SEO
Also called: search engine optimization, search engine optimisation, organic search optimization
Definition
SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of helping search engines crawl, understand and rank your pages so people searching for what you offer find your site, and increasingly, find your brand inside AI-generated answers.
Google's own starter guide describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it. That is still the best one-line version. Everything else is detail.
How it works
Search engines run in three stages: they crawl pages, store what they understand in an index, and serve the most relevant results when someone searches. SEO work maps to those stages:
- Technical: make sure pages can be crawled and kept in the index. See indexing.
- Content: answer the question behind the query better than the pages already ranking. That starts with search intent.
- Authority: earn links and mentions from sites people trust. See backlink.
The result you measure is organic traffic: visits from non-ad search results, which Google Analytics now defines as including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Why it matters for marketers
Paid search stops when the budget does. A page that ranks keeps getting read. SEO is slow to start and compounds once it works, which is why most companies run it next to paid channels rather than instead of them.
It has also widened. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems, so the same work that gets a page ranked is what gets it pulled into an AI answer. Google's May 2026 guide states that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. The newer labels, AEO and GEO, describe where the answer shows up, not a different discipline.
How SEO plays out on Reddit
You cannot optimize reddit.com's templates, but Reddit threads rank for a huge range of buying questions. Google added a "Discussions and forums" section to results in September 2022 and signed a deal for Reddit's Data API in February 2024. Reddit is also the most-cited domain in AI search across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews (Peec AI, US data, March 2026).
So "Reddit SEO" usually means two things: finding threads that already rank for your buyers' queries and adding a genuinely useful answer, and earning the kind of organic mentions that show up when people search your category. The Reddit SEO page covers the mechanics.
Common mistakes
- Chasing outdated signals. Google says it does not use the meta keywords tag, and keywords in a domain name have hardly any ranking effect.
- Keyword stuffing. It reads badly and is against Google's spam policies.
- Writing for the crawler first. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether content was made to help people or to attract search visits. The second kind tends to lose.
- Dropping links into Reddit threads to "build SEO". Mods remove them, the account takes the hit, and the thread loses trust in you. A useful answer that names your product does more.
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO still worth doing now that AI answers sit above the results?
Yes. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the same index and ranking systems, and a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in them. Good SEO is the entry ticket to AI visibility.
Do I need separate AEO or GEO work?
Google's own guidance says no special files, markup or rewriting are needed for its AI features. Other AI engines differ in which sources they cite, so tracking where your brand is mentioned still matters.
Can you do SEO on Reddit?
Not on the pages themselves, but you can show up in Reddit threads that already rank on Google or get cited by AI tools, by answering the question well and following each subreddit's rules.