The Jeff Payne Show

Send us Fan Mail Earlier this year, Google rolled out a quiet update that hit self-promoting “best of” listicles hard — some SaaS companies lost close to half of their organic visibility within weeks. It looked like the format was finished. But a fresh analysis of over five million search results tells a stranger story: self-promoting listicles are now growing faster in traffic than the market average. In this episode, Jeff breaks down what actually separates the listicles that are thriving f...

Send us Fan Mail Marketing teams have suddenly and urgently become interested in Reddit this year — not because their customers moved there, but because AI search engines have started citing it constantly. Jeff Payne breaks down why that's the wrong reason to invest in any platform, why the keyword-seeding tactic fails even on its own terms, and the simple, no-cost test that tells a business whether a channel is actually worth its time before spending a dollar or an hour on it.

Send us Fan Mail For 25 years, an entire industry has believed that somewhere inside Google is a formula — and if you could just find it, you'd win. Sworn testimony from Google's federal antitrust trial says otherwise. Google's own Search VP testified under oath about a system called Navboost — one that tracks how real people behave toward a search result (clicks, hovers, scrolls, return visits) and holds that data for thirteen months to keep adjusting rankings. There's no shortcut around thi...

Send us Fan Mail Two thousand years ago, an archery student named Ji Chang asked the best instructor in his province to teach him to shoot. He was told, first, to learn how not to blink. Five years — and one more lesson in learning to see — passed before he ever touched a bow. In this episode, Jeff Payne unpacks what this ancient parable means for how business owners and CEOs carry their goals — and why holding a big goal in your head every hour of the day isn't discipline; it's just weight. ...

Send us Fan Mail Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations collapsed by 86% in a matter of days this August — one of the most trusted sources in AI search nearly disappeared from ChatGPT's answers almost overnight. Jeff Payne breaks down what the data actually shows: a structural change in how ChatGPT searches for answers, favoring named sites it can ask directly over open-web crawling. Jeff unpacks why that shift matters more than the Reddit headline itself, explains what's still uncertain a...