TL;DR: Nope. But your mileage may vary.

Doing a clipping campaign on Whop.com where you pay people to clip your videos and post it on their social media sounds alluring, it sounds new, it sounds oh so very Gen-Z.

But it’s also the metaphorical equivalent of gouging your eyes out with a cold, rusty spoon. You just shouldn’t do it.

OK, there are probably parts of the internet that find the idea of gouging out eyes with cold and rusty spoons rather exciting. Likewise, you might be the type of business that likes to set fire to hundred dollar bills just to light a cigar.

Let’s take a closer look.

What is Whop?

Whop is to Gen-Z what Youtube and Instagram is to millennials. It’s the place for creators to make money shilling shit selling products to their legions of fans. This is not your old school influencer selling other people’s shit, this is creators selling their own stuff.

Apparently Whop is quite successful at this with dozens of media reports of teens making money from it.

What has teens selling shit got to do with SaaS companies?

Somewhere along Whop’s growth journey someone had the rather clever idea that creators could reward their fans for reposting clips on other social networks. Think TikTok videos, Reels on Instagram, and Shorts on YouTube.

You know, the stuff that social networks and investors go starry eyed over because it’s like cocaine for the eyes.

It was a pretty good idea.

Creators upload their videos and their legions of fans devour it like locust in a biblical plague, turning one video into hundreds or even thousands of clips.

The fans earn a few bucks for the views they generate and the Creator turns her fans into a marketing army to spread her influence far and wide.

Still don’t get what this has to do with SaaS companies

Yeah, I’m coming to that.

When so many creators are getting their clips re-shared, then Gen-Z is going to take notice. Few apps sum up Gen-Z marketing better than Cluely, the most super-scary app ever developed if you are responsible for legal stuff in a corporate.

Cluely is built on the back of founders and early employees who are creators first and business people second (they might dispute this, but I said what I said).

If you want a job at Cluely you need to show you have at least 10,000 followers on a social network first and are an influencer in your own right.

Now (and I’m hypothesizing here) the Cluely team, being creators themselves, realized that they could become a “corporate creator” on Whop, upload their own videos and then pay ridiculous sums of money to jobless people who would create clips and upload it to their own social profiles or even create brand new social profiles.

Overnight people’s TikTok and Instagram feeds were being flooded with “cheat on everything” Cluely content, courtesy of (I believe) clippers on Whop.com.

Since nothing stays secret in marketing for long, other AI apps and podcasters started to take notice and upload their own videos and reward clippers for views.

For example, Perplexity, which just scored $200m in funding, is a big user of whop, paying out tends of thousands each month.

So what happened with StreamAlive when it tried to use Whop?

This is rather painful. Like going to the doctors with an embarrassing problem.

At StreamAlive we need to find growth channels that can explode our user base. We’re a product-led growth app with a low price point so we can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars acquiring customers, or thousands to acquire paid users.

We need low cost, high leverage growth levers, and if all these AI companies were using Whop they must be on to something because they’re all reporting $18bn MRR in 2 months or something ridiculous like that.

The thing about growth marketing is you have a dozen experiments going on at once to find something that works. Whop might be that thing that worked.

Narrator: It wasn’t.

Setting up your Whop account

Our first clue that we weren’t in Kansas any more was when we tried to set up our Whop account.

If you’re used to slick SaaS apps with butter smooth onboarding and emails from the founder ‘personally’ welcoming you, then you’re going to feel like you entered the wild west of apps. There is no law here.

You’re basically left to figure it out.

I couldn’t figure it out so I got one of our Gen-Zs to figure it out.

He couldn’t figure it out either.

Together, we clicked buttons, opened links, and went round and round in circles until we figured that to create a clipping campaign you had to first create a product, but since we didn’t have a product, it wasn’t an actual product, it was, well, I don’t know what it was, we had to create it and set it to free.

Then Whop users could see the product and buy it for free. Or something like that.

THEN when these users bought the free product they were eligible to create video clips from the content that we uploaded.

I still don’t understand it, but that’s what you have to do.

Next you have to create your Content Rewards campaign for your product. You can create your Content Rewards campaign before you have created your product, but people can’t be a part of the Content Rewards campaign until you’ve created a product and they’ve bought it.

If you want to curl up into a ball and cry after trying to understand this workflow, then you are on the same path we were on. We’ll meet at destination f**ked.

So now your product is created, your Content Rewards campaign is active and funded (don’t ask!), you’ll start getting users who want to create video clips of your content and post it on their social networks.

This is where you encounter the first problem.

Users on Whop have no regard for your brand standards or requirements. They are interested in extracting the maximum amount of monies for the minimum amount of effort.

Therefore 100% of clips are generated using apps like opus.pro (but since the users are penniless they are probably using a cheap knock-off from appsumo).

Some clips are from videos that you didn’t even ask them to create clips for. Like this one, which isn’t on any StreamAlive channel as it was at an event and posted by the event organizers.

Many clips contain the user’s personal watermark even when our requirements said: DO NOT USE A WATERMARK

We rejected some of the videos with Creator watermarks and our Whop chat exploded.

WHy YoU reJeCt mY VIdeO :angry face: :crying face:

Apparently creators for our campaign believed that uploading our video to their AI clipping tool which automatically spits out video clips for them to use constitutes “great amount of effort” and they are “protecting my time and investment” by adding their watermark.

Eventually we decided not to fight it. It’s like putting water back into a sieve.

But trying to get people to adhere to the requirements was the least of our problems.

The real problem was with Whop Content Rewards

When you set up your content rewards (the name for asking people to clip your videos and paying them for the views they generate) you enter how much you want to spend and how much you want to pay per 1,000 views.

All very straightforward.

We researched other AI apps and saw they were offering $2-$3 per 1,000 views. We entered a bit lower because we were testing the waters.

You also set the maximum payout that a person can earn PER VIDEO.

Initially we set this to $100 thinking it was per user. Yet another thing that Whop lets you find out for yourself.

Then all the submissions come in and you have to review the video and the account and approve it. The videos have a few dozen reviews so it all looks legit.

But that’s when things get sketchy real fast. The video that you approved last night with a few dozen reviews suddenly gets tens of thousands of views overnight.

Before you know it, every video coincidentally hits the EXACT amount of views needed to get the maximum payout per video.

And then? The views just stop.

Whop has a major bot problem on Content Rewards

We quickly reduced the maximum payout per video down to $25 and the fallout in the chat was even bigger than when we said “no watermarks”.

We were being accused of being frauds and scammers for switching the maximum payouts after clippers had worked “so hard” to get views on the videos.

Never mind that the same people accusing us of being frauds were the ones using bots to generate views to get the maximum payout.

So what happened when we lowered the payout to $25?

Suddenly none of the videos got more than 30k views. That’s all the clippers needed to get the payout so paying the bot views factory more would be a waste of money.

Content Reward video clips always get the exact amount of views needed to get the maximum payout. That’s not a coincidence.

What went wrong?

We did a bit of reading and realized that we should have only accepted users from certain countries. The advice that is available is to block users from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan, Egypt and a dozen other countries.

Of course, you never would have found the setting to do this yourself, because it’s placed under the descriptively named “Control Center”. The only option in the Control Center is to block countries. So why it’s not called “Country Filter” or something that actually describes what it does, I don’t know 🤷

Once in the Control Center you can select which countries to block. Whop even recommends which countries to block, so why doesn’t it do that by default?!

Now that we’ve blocked users from all the bad actor countries we thought we’d see an increase in quality of videos and a believable amount of organic views on the videos they created.

We. Were. So. Naive.

Blocking these countries made ZERO difference. A teenager from Bangladesh who has discovered he can make $100 with $10 of bot views isn’t going to let a geo-IP detection stop him. All the users from the blocked countries are using VPNs to appear like they are in the US or Europe.

The final sting in the tail

According to the Whop analytics, we paid $1,500 to generate about 845,000 views, of which 99.999% were bot views.

It stung quite bad.

But then, as I was writing this Whop review I discovered something that has made the experience even more unpleasant.

Virtually all the StreamAlive videos created by the clippers have been deleted.

The only saving grace, we thought, was that at least now when people search on TikTok or Instagram, they’ll see lots of videos talking about StreamAlive.

But nope. Even that has been taken away.

What the hell is going on with Whop?

All of this begs the question: What the hell are all these other AI apps and influencers doing paying out thousands of dollars for bot views?

The people running the campaigns are not stupid. They know that all the views are bot views. Whop TELLS you that these views are bot views. But month after month they continue to pay out thousands of dollars.

WHY?

I have a theory.

For companies like Cluely and Perplexity and Replit the amount paid out is less than a rounding error in their marketing budgets. These companies have got so much money that they are probably tapped out on so many other channels, they need to find somewhere to spend their money to show growth and momentum.

So they come to Whop.

And it makes for an incredible story that the media just LOVES.

“I have 372 employees creating clips of my content on social media 24 hours a day“

WOW! Tell me more! Journalists love this kind of angle.

Social media goes gaga over a hook like this.

The next reason is that now, if you were to search your favourite doom scrolling app for something related to Cluely, Perplexity or one of the other AI apps that pay out thousands of dollars for bot views, you see a never-ending wall of video clips.

These apps suddenly look BIG, if everyone is talking about them and creating videos about them.

A barbaric despot dictator once said:

Quantity has a quality of its own.

And I think in a round about way that’s what the play is here for the massively funded AI apps. Flood the zone with clips to make it look like “everyone is talking about you”.

And they are talking about you because you’re telling people you have an army of influencers.

Then, tell investors that you have figured out untapped growth channels that costs literal pennies to ‘hire an army of influencers’ and who is going to closely inspect every single one of those 372 accounts on TikTok and try and figure out if they are legit or bot accounts?

Suddenly a unnoticed requirement that all these other apps made in their Content Reward programmes made sense.

They said that clippers had to create new accounts with the brand name in the account and upload the clips from there.

Fewer clippers will delete the throwaway account than videos from their actual account.

We were so, so, so naive.

Where do we go from here?

If by some chance this article has ranked in Google or in ChatGPT for people asking if Whop.com is legit or if the content rewards programme works for B2B SaaS companies, then hopefully you have your answer.

Whop.com is a place to get hundreds of thousands of bot views on dozens or even hundreds of videos across TikTok, Instagram, and Meta.

If your goal is to show investors and the media that you have a super-popular app that everyone is talking about on social media, then it’s probably the cheapest and most effective method you can find.

If you thought that you were going to get visibility and raise awareness for your app, you are going to be so incredibly disappointed.

Generative AI and Google’s AI Overviews are cutting clicks on informational keywords by 30–40%. SaaS companies are losing vanity traffic, but higher-intent visitors are still converting. SEO isn’t dead. The play now is to focus on brand search, structured answers, multi-format content, and new channels like AI assistants and marketplaces.

The gut punch nobody asked for

If you run a SaaS business, you’ve probably noticed something strange blood-curdling in your analytics in the last few months.

Traffic that used to trickle (or flood) in from Google is down. Like WAY down.

And when you search your own keywords, Google is now doing a cheery AI summary at the top, basically swallowing your hard-earned content and spitting it back out in 67 words.

Thanks, AI.

The fear is obvious: if ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity can answer buyer questions directly, will anyone ever click through to your site again?

This post looks at what is really happening with Google’s AI Overviews and LLMs, why the biggest hit is on informational traffic, and how SaaS founders can adapt their discovery strategies before SEO as they know it slips away.

The impact of AI on SEO: traffic and click-through rates are falling

This is not just paranoia. Multiple studies confirm what founders and marketers are whispering in Slack groups:

• Pew Research (2025) found that when an AI Overview appears, users click a traditional result in 8% of searches versus 15% without the summary. That is basically halving your odds.
• Ahrefs (2025) showed position-one CTR on affected queries dropped from 7.3% to 2.6%, a 34.5% reduction.
• BrightEdge (2025) reported CTR is down around 30% since AI Overviews rolled out, with B2B Tech queries now showing AI answers in more than 70% of cases.
• Amsive saw CTR declines averaging 15.5% across 700,000 keywords, with non-branded queries hit hardest.

This erosion is most visible in informational searches, where users are happy to take the AI summary and move on.

Wait, what is an informational search?

In SEO, searches are often grouped into three types:

• Informational: The user wants an answer or explanation. Example: “fun Zoom icebreakers” or “what is application performance monitoring.”
• Navigational: The user is looking for a specific brand or site. Example: “StreamAlive login” or “HubSpot pricing.”
• Transactional: The user intends to take action, like buying or signing up. Example: “best webinar engagement tools” or “buy Slack alternative.”

Informational queries are the most vulnerable to AI Overviews and chatbots because they can be answered in a single summary, without the need to click through to a website.

And the kicker? These summaries often cite Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, or your competitor’s blog. You might still be fueling the machine, just not getting the click.

Why informational keywords are the biggest casualty

The biggest hit is on informational queries like “what is X,” “how does Y work,” or “fun Zoom icebreakers” (more on that later).

These searches were the top-of-funnel bread and butter for SaaS marketing teams. No content strategist worth their thesaurus would be caught without a bunch of blog posts titled “What is a CRM?” or “What is a sales enablement tool?”

Now? Google owns your click.

And ChatGPT owns your customer education.

Monday.com’s share price tanks

On the second quarter earning’s call, Monday.com admitted that their organic search strategy had taken a major hit from the AI overviews. All the top of the funnel keywords it had ranked for around team management and project management were now being answered in the search results.

People don’t need to click through to Monday.com’s 2,500 word article.

The impact of this admission was stark. A 40% drop in the share price over the last month.

It’s a bloodbath out there for SEO-driven websites that relied on Google to send them traffic and leads.

The impact of AI overviews on StreamAlive’s web traffic

StreamAlive hasn’t been immune to the rollout of AI overviews either.

We built hundreds of pages around meeting icebreakers using programmatic SEO. These pages pulled in thousands of visitors, but conversion was awful, about 0.6%.

In the last six months, traffic to those pages has halved because Google’s AI Overview can now do an equally good job answering “fun zoom icebreakers.”

But here’s the interesting part: conversions actually went up.

The conversion rate on those pages is now almost 1.3%. The visitors we lost were never going to sign up anyway. The people still clicking are the ones are more motivated and have a higher intent to solve their meeting icebreaker problem (if such a thing exists).

Another interesting trend that has happened in August is the traffic to the icebreaker pages has gone up for the first time in five months AND the conversion rate has gone up.

Is Google’s AI overviews helping to pre-sell people on the need for meeting icebreakers, warming them up before they click through to StreamAlive?

It’s a theory.

What this does reveal however is a counterintuitive truth: traffic loss is not always a business loss.

If you built your funnel on fluff traffic in order to gain ‘exposure’, AI is stripping it away. What you are left with may be smaller in volume but higher in intent.

I suspect the traffic loss for Monday.com will be alarming, but not catastrophic as it loses traffic on keywords that didn’t directly convert.

Case study: playing the AI self-full filling cycle game

Now here’s where the new game of generative AI for visibilty gets a bit meta.

We’ve been using generative AI to create lots of top of funnel content for StreamAlive. As you saw above, total signups from these pages have dropped slightly, but given that traffic halved, conversion has gone up.

It almost feels like AI is creating content for AI to reference because now we are seeing more visits from ChatGPT and Perplexity to these AI-generated, programmatic pages. That is bizarre and slightly worrying for the future of generative AI, but right now it is also an opportunity.

The takeaway we’ve got from our observations so far is: generative AI is not only taking traffic away, it is also a channel you can feed.

Well-structured, relevant, and multi-format content (text, video, documentation) gives the models something to cite. We have found that when we publish content in several formats around the same topic, we are more likely to dominate the AI summaries.

Here’s a screenshot from a Google search which shows what we’ve been able to achieve using multiple content types around target keywords.

Not only is StreamAlive heavily cited in the AI overview with links to our YouTube videos and use case pages, it’s also ranking multiple pages from the website at the top, above Microsoft’s own website!

How B2B buyers are using generative AI for research

It is not just Google. Buyers are shifting their discovery habits into generative AI tools.

• Forrester reports 89% of B2B buyers now use generative AI somewhere in the buying process.
• TrustRadius found 72% encountered Google’s AI Overviews during software research, with 90% clicking at least one cited source.
• Adobe says AI-referred traffic to websites has already grown more than 10x in the past year.

Translation: buyers are not only searching in Google, they are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude for recommendations and answers. The funnel is starting inside AI.

1,000% increase in traffic from ChatGPT

This is clearly illustrated in StreamAlive’s traffic from ChatGPT. In September 2024, Google Analytics tracked just 15 visitors from ChatGPT. By August 2025 there has been a 10x increase to over 170 visits.

That’s just 2% of our overall traffic at the moment, but the traffic from ChatGPT (and other LLMs) converts at over 15% compared to search engine traffic which converts at around 8% overall.

Strategies for SaaS discovery beyond Google

Rumours about the death of SEO are being greatly exaggerated right now.

But the rules have mutated, as they have always done ever since two Stamford graduates built a curious little app call backrub.

What marketers and SaaS founders need to do is adapt to this new normal.

1. Stop chasing vanity traffic

If AI eats the fluff clicks that were never going to convert, let it. Better to have fewer, higher-intent visitors than a flood of people who were never going to sign up anyway.

2. Optimize for being cited in AI Overviews

Structured, authoritative content is more likely to be pulled into AI summaries. Even if users do not click, being cited still influences buyer perception when they shortlist tools.

3. Double down on brand search and demand capture

Make sure that when buyers do move past the AI summary, they are looking for you by name. Stronger brand building, community presence, and consistent messaging are not optional anymore.

4. Diversify discovery channels

Relying only on Google in 2025 is like relying on Yellow Pages in 2005. Buyers are in Slack groups, marketplaces, YouTube, newsletters, and yes, inside LLMs. Spread your bets and test referral sources outside Google.

5. Publish in multiple formats

We have found combining video, blog, and documentation content makes it more likely we dominate AI summaries. Multi-format answers give AI more to latch onto.

6. Keep producing good content

After 25 years in SEO, one thing is constant: every few years the rules change. Generative AI is a monumental shift, but buyers still need information. Better to be present in AI summaries than invisible.

The future of SEO for SaaS in the age of AI

SEO has always been cyclical. Every five years, a “search is dead” narrative pops up. But generative AI is a bigger disruption than mobile-first indexing or featured snippets.

Here is the likely future:

• Informational queries will continue to be answered directly in AI tools.
• Transactional and branded queries will still drive traffic to SaaS websites.
• Content that AI can reference will carry disproportionate influence, even if it drives fewer clicks.
• Brand strength will determine whether buyers search for you by name, not just your category.

Wrapping up: clarity in the AI traffic apocalypse

The panic is real. Traffic graphs are heading south. But the real story is not that SEO is dead. It is that the buyer journey is mutating, and AI is the newest middleman in town.

If your SaaS depends only on ranking for “what is [category],” you have got a problem. If you adapt, focus on brand, get cited, and diversify channels, you will come out leaner and stronger.

And if you are sitting there thinking, “Okay, but what the hell do I actually do for my business?” that is where I can help. Book an AI clarity call and we will figure out how your SaaS can survive (and maybe even grow) in the AI traffic apocalypse.

Will Generative AI Kill SEO for SaaS?

Q1. Is SEO dead because of AI Overviews?
No. AI Overviews cut clicks on informational terms, but high-intent traffic still converts. Shift strategy rather than quit.

Q2. What keywords are most at risk?
Broad informational queries. “What is,” “how to,” and listicles lose the most visibility.

Q3. What should SaaS focus on now?
Brand search, comparison and pricing pages, structured answers, and multi-format content.

Q4. Do AI citations still drive buyers?
Yes. Volume is small. Less than 2% of the traffic the StreamAlive website recieves is from ChatGPT, but LLM referrals can convert better than classic organic.

Q5. What is a good conversion rate for traffic from ChatGPT?
StreamAlive converts 16% of visitors from ChatGPT into signups for its product. This is double the conversion rate of its organic search traffic which is 8%.

Q6. Should we block AI crawlers?
Only if you have a clear reason. If you want inclusion, allow compliant bots and keep pages crawlable.

Pagerank. It’s a little green bar that can mean the difference between your site earning thousands of pounds a month and nothing. Well, that has been the story up until now. An entire link buying industry has sprung up around the little green graphic.

Google was “supposed” to update the pagerank of all the sites in mid July. Now, 3 months later and there is still no sign of this happening. Pagerank is not being updated.

Further research has led me to conclude that Pagerank as we know it is dead. Google has constantly stated that it doesn’t rank websites according to pagerank (it’s a very common misconception that higher pagerank automatically means higher rankings), and Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, has said that pagerank is not a big deal in Google and exporting the data to the toolbar is seen as a none event.

There’s no official word from Google as of yet on the status of Pagerank and it’s future, so it might not be officially dead, but they’ve never taken this long to update the toolbar before.

Still, pagerank had it’s uses. You could gauge the level of popularity of a website if it had a high PR and determine whether it was worth getting those valuable backlinks. Now that PR is dead (but certainly not forgotten) it leaves webmasters and internet marketers to rely on other sources, namely Alexa and Compete.

Both of these sites try and estimate the level of traffic to a site and quite frankly, both of them do a rubbish job. They take their sample data from users that have installed their toolbar. This means that if a site gets 100,000 visitors a month but none of them have the toolbar, and another site gets 1,000 visitors a month and 10% of them have the toolbar installed, the latter website would be ranked higher.

So what are we left with now to determine the value of a link or advertising on a website? It’s very difficult. Say what you want about Pagerank, but it was an exceptionally useful tool for determining the cost of a link or advertising.

When most people think of search engine optimization (well ok, only those that are actually nerdy enough to know what it is of course!) they immediately think about meta tags, keyword density and doorway pages.

Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

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To the average internet user the acronym SEO is just yet another bit of gobbledegook internet jargon tossed around by web geeks and nerds. To some of us web geeks and nerds SEO is the be all and end all of internet promotion. The holy grail of appearing at number one spot on Google is a dream many of us aspire to bring in to reality…but often fall dismally short in Supplemental Hell.

So often the different between getting a good ranking and a bad ranking is down to how you approach the optimization of your site. As with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you’re looking at a life in Supplementalville, do it right and you get to live on the converted home page bringing in so many visitors you won’t know what to do.

Sidenote: Google’s Supplemental Index are results that it gives when it can’t find anything definite that you are searching for. Web pages in the supplemental index are pages that don’t have enough inbound links for Google to ‘trust’ the page enough to serve it up as a main result.

If you want to get good rankings, then make sure you avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes:

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