r/SEO_LLM: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

Posts assume you know what schema, citations, GEO, AEO and Search Console are, and nobody stops to define them. The better threads argue about method: how to pick prompts, how much noise is in a visibility score, how to prove cause. A basic question still gets a few patient replies, but the room is small and a generic one usually gets generic answers.

• In-house SEOs and marketers asked to report on AI visibility for the first time.
• Agency people working out how to measure and bill for GEO work.
• Site owners trying to understand why they rank on Google but are not cited in AI answers.
• Founders and staff of AI visibility tools, in the posts and in the comments.
• Local and niche SEOs who mostly want to know whether the old playbook still holds.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/SEO_LLM.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up58%
• Removed by Reddit's filters26%
• Held by AutoModerator13%
• Deleted by the author3%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

The culture

r/SEO_LLM was created in July 2025 and has a little over 8,000 members. It sees three or four posts a day and the typical post gets two comments. The subject is narrow: how brands and pages end up mentioned or cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI results, and how to measure that.

Two thirds of posts are text and about half of titles are questions. The threads that get replies are about measurement. How do you pick prompts for tracking. Why do two tools give wildly different citation counts for the same site. Is a mention without a citation worth anything. Comments run longer than on most subreddits, around 40 words, and often lay out a method step by step.

The running argument is whether AI visibility is a new discipline or SEO with a new label. Plenty of commenters push the second view, and a study showing organic search still delivers far more conversions than AI referrals got a real discussion. The other tension is promotion. There are no written rules, tool vendors are active, and some posts and comments are thin wrappers around a product. The link hold is the only defence the subreddit has.

What lands

• A measurement question with your current method written out, such as a fixed prompt set and what you record for each query.
• An honest progress report with specifics: what you did for two months, what moved and what did not.
• A puzzle from real data, like a site cited hundreds of times but almost never named.
• Agency problems told straight, for example a client asking for proof that the GEO work caused the lift.
• Original numbers from a study across many sites, with the method stated.

What gets removed or ignored

• Posts with a URL in the body. AutoModerator holds them and tells you to repost without it.
• Comments with a URL, which go into the same review queue.
• A large share of posts never clear Reddit's own filters. Our data does not show why, and there were no moderator removals in our sample to learn from.

The unwritten rules

• Name a tool in plain text if you must. Do not link it. Tool names are common in comments, links are rare.
• Say what kind of site it is: niche, size, traffic, how old. Answers depend on it and the good replies ask.
• Declare your interest. One well-received post opened by saying the author was not a GEO vendor. People check.
• Expect pushback on hype. Claims that AI search changes everything get met with data showing Google still sends most of the traffic.
• Scores are low. The top posts in our sample sit in the low teens. Replies are the measure.

Self-promotion

Nothing is written down. There is no rules list and the sidebar is a welcome message. The only stated limit is the AutoModerator hold on URLs in posts and comments. In practice vendors post and comment here regularly, and I tested this tool posts do stay up, but they get little response next to a real question. If you work on a product in this space, the approach that fits the room is to answer measurement questions in detail, mention the tool by name only where it is the answer, and leave the link out.

How people write here

Typical post length

93 words

Typical title length

11 words

Titles phrased as a question

48%

Typical comment length

42 words

Comments that include a link

2%

Posts that carry a flair

33%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/SEO_LLM.

• seo 92 posts
• visibility 68 posts
• search 80 posts
• geo 49 posts
• chatgpt 65 posts
• ai search 43 posts
• content 64 posts
• ai visibility 35 posts
• perplexity 37 posts
• citations 35 posts
• cited 32 posts
• citation 27 posts
• google 58 posts
• mentions 29 posts
• brand 46 posts
• answers 40 posts
• llms 29 posts
• brand mentions 15 posts
• aeo 27 posts
• rankings 21 posts
• tracking 35 posts
• gemini 29 posts
• traffic 32 posts
• ranking 21 posts
• pages 31 posts
• prompts 26 posts
• ai overviews 18 posts
• chatgpt perplexity 16 posts
• llm 29 posts
• engines 20 posts
• sources 23 posts
• answer 36 posts
• competitors 18 posts
• site 32 posts
• traditional seo 12 posts
• tools 39 posts
• cite 13 posts
• ai citations 11 posts
• optimization 17 posts
• data 42 posts

Posts that did well

• ChatGPT has cited about 700 of our pages and named the site five times. Is a citation worth anything without the name?14 upvotes · 14 comments
• How are you picking prompts for AI rank tracking?13 upvotes · 19 comments
• What’s one thing you’ve done that actually helped your website get more traffic?12 upvotes · 13 comments
• 2 months into AI visibility work (schema, directories, 3 articles/week) and citations barely moved. What was your actual timeline?12 upvotes · 28 comments
• AI Visibility vs SEO What’s Actually Different?12 upvotes · 15 comments

Common questions