Patrick Stox

I think the next frontier of spam fighting from the search/AI companies is going to hit one of the most popular page types in SEO/GEO right now: comparison and alternative pages. These are pages on your own site that pit your brand against competitors, across the whole brand or a specific product or service (Brand X vs. Y, Product X vs. Y, [Competitor] Alternatives). They've been making the rounds as an SEO/GEO goldmine lately, and "build a lot of these" is advice I keep hearing at conferences and reading in industry blogs and social posts. This is similar to what I've been sharing all year with "listicles" - and I've got a new Substack piece coming out (ASAP!) on how Google and OpenAI are tuning their AI answers to lean less on brands promoting themselves. Stay tuned for that. Comparison pages are trickier and more nuanced. There are genuine use cases for doing them well, especially at a small scale, and I've occasionally recommended them to clients in certain situations. But like everything in SEO: once a tactic works, it becomes popular and people scale it. (File under: "this is why we can't have nice things" 🫠) The "build these pages" advice inevitably leads folks to use AI to spin up as many as possible. I've already advised several companies that launched dozens, even hundreds of comparison/alternative pages (AKA an "SEO pattern") and ran into trouble. For example, A couple sites got hit by Google's late January update this year. The fundamental problem: like any other "review" page, Google already has strict criteria for product reviews. The core requirement is that you prove you actually tried and tested the product, with evidence. For a brand comparing itself to competitors, meeting that bar would mean you've hired your competitor(s) and your own company, and are authentically reviewing your honest experience using their services. How many brands can say they've actually done that? My guess is probably close to 0. What usually ends up happening instead is brands do "research" about their competition, leaning on negative reviews of their competitors or worse - making up incorrect or untrue information to make your own offering look better than theirs. I believe we're already seeing - and will keep seeing - Google, OpenAI and other AI companies look for "objective" 3rd party reviews* instead of leaning on biased brand content when they generate answers. This is ultimately why I think search/AI companies lean so heavily into Reddit discussions, YouTube reviews, Trustpilot, G2, and other major review sites. (*Yes, I know these 3rd party sites are often influenced / manipulated / pay-to-play as well... so that's a big challenge for them too.) So, as always: test, experiment, learn. But my spidey senses say that building these pages at scale - and doing it inauthentically - like trashing your competitor while calling yourself the best - is risky. When too many sites adopt these approaches, they become a liability long-term.

Is traffic from ChatGPT back? I checked AI traffic for 3 B2B SaaS sites (Sitechecker, Tango, Favikon) and found that after May 5, all of them have spikes of traffic from ChatGPT. I assume that the last GPT-5.5 model, released on May 5, is responsible for this. I don't know whether more links to sites were a planned move by ChatGPT, to get more attention from site owners or just a side effect of them deciding to improve the end-user experience. But it looks like this is one of many counterattacks that ChatGPT has delivered to the fast-growing Claude and Gemini. Did you see this spike in your GA4 properties? Note that such a spike is easy to detect only on websites that already have solid AI traffic every day.