Stop calling it ‘organic’: A plea for honesty in digital marketing

Last week, I read a LinkedIn post that made me bristle.

A SaaS company was celebrating what they called a “growth hack”: creating Reddit threads with product recommendations, positioned within seemingly genuine peer conversations, and successfully manipulating large language models to cite them as top recommendations in their category.

The results were undeniably impressive. Significant increases in LLM visibility, top rankings as a recommended tool across multiple AI platforms, hundreds of thousands of organic Reddit views, and prominent placement in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.

But one phrase in their announcement demands scrutiny. “Then we mentioned [Brand name] organically, inside real conversations.”