Forums are about to become valuable again for SEO

SEOGami · Wednesday at 3:03 PM

Saw an interesting study today looking at around 35k ChatGPT citations by Kevin

Once you take the company's own site out of the equation, UGC was apparently the biggest third party source category, ahead of publishers and review sites.

Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.

Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.

The link itself might not even be the interesting part anymore. If ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and the other engines keep pulling opinions and brand information from communities, simply being discussed in the right places could have value.

Obviously the study is only SaaS and ChatGPT so I wouldn't draw massive conclusions from it yet.

Anyone actually testing this?

Not talking about spamming Reddit with fake recommendations. More whether you've seen forum/community mentions influence what ChatGPT or AI Overviews says about a brand.

javadth · Wednesday at 3:05 PM

Yeah, I wanted to open a similar topic today

i see many parasites related to forums.

HenryObi · Wednesday at 3:09 PM

SEOGami said:
Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.

I've actually seen the effects of Reddit but yet to try and see that of LinkedIn. Wikipedia is difficult since you can't create as much links or even conversations as in the other two.

SEOGami said:
Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.

Forum links are still not great links, from this study you can see it's not the link that is being valued but rather the opinions of users on the forums. In essence, all that matters is a mention of the brand not even a link. I've also seen this, chatGPT cited a reddit page for my site. On that Reddit page, the user only mentioned my site and not linked to it.

Deadite · Wednesday at 3:09 PM

javadth said:
Yeah, I wanted to open a similar topic today

i see many parasites related to forums.

Can you give an example?
I saw fitness.com being used as a parasite. Then I tried to create an account and I never received an email to verify my account and be able to post.
Same happened with other forums, they are ranking and being abused, but they are apparently not opened for everyone

luckyman · Wednesday at 3:10 PM

SEOGami said:
Saw an interesting study today looking at around 35k ChatGPT citations by Kevin

Once you take the company's own site out of the equation, UGC was apparently the biggest third party source category, ahead of publishers and review sites.

Wikipedia, Reddit and LinkedIn made up almost all of the UGC citations in their dataset.

Kind of funny considering SEOs spent the last decade treating forums mostly as crappy link building opportunities.

The link itself might not even be the interesting part anymore. If ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and the other engines keep pulling opinions and brand information from communities, simply being discussed in the right places could have value.

Obviously the study is only SaaS and ChatGPT so I wouldn't draw massive conclusions from it yet.

Anyone actually testing this?

Not talking about spamming Reddit with fake recommendations. More whether you've seen forum/community mentions influence what ChatGPT or AI Overviews says about a brand.

Yes, we are testing.

I’m actually testing this right now with forum/community marketing, and so far it’s working very well.

From what I’m seeing, these mentions do seem to have an impact on how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

-> Long articles on medium
-> Long + short youtube videos
-> LinkedIn post
-> main site,

working and working very well

well, these days forum links are very effecting, high DA + traffic.

Thanks

javadth · Wednesday at 3:21 PM

Deadite said:
Can you give an example?
I saw fitness.com being used as a parasite. Then I tried to create an account and I never received an email to verify my account and be able to post.
Same happened with other forums, they are ranking and being abused, but they are apparently not opened for everyone

check my posts

SEOGami · Wednesday at 3:55 PM

HenryObi said:
Forum links are still not great links, from this study you can see it's not the link that is being valued but rather the opinions of users on the forums. In essence, all that matters is a mention of the brand not even a link. I've also seen this, chatGPT cited a reddit page for my site. On that Reddit page, the user only mentioned my site and not linked to it.

This is the exact behaviour we've noticed. So we've been working on a strategy that included owning the SERPs for brand keywords + using forums and other UGC elements as mention portals that capture the niche.

So far the results have been promising.

ShannLi · Friday at 6:36 AM

luckyman said:
Yes, we are testing.

I’m actually testing this right now with forum/community marketing, and so far it’s working very well.

From what I’m seeing, these mentions do seem to have an impact on how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

-> Long articles on medium
-> Long + short youtube videos
-> LinkedIn post
-> main site,

working and working very well

well, these days forum links are very effecting, high DA + traffic.

Thanks

It's a LinkedIn post, not a LinkedIn article, right?

saju2014 · 2026-08-16T11:40:25+0100

Forums could matter again, but probably more for genuine brand mentions than backlinks. The key will be real discussions, not obvious SEO seeding.

Forums are about to become valuable again for SEO

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