May 27 2026
Why LLMs Cite Reddit Instead Of Your Brand: A Practical AI Visibility Audit [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

When a customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews about a brand near them, the answer increasingly comes from a Reddit thread.

For many brands, their owned content is not showing up.

Across most industries, Reddit is now the single most-cited source in AI search. For multi-location brands, that creates a problem most haven’t solved: showing up consistently inside answers across every market, neighborhood, and language they operate in.

Why Reddit Sits Behind So Many AI Answers

AI search engines weight community signals heavily because they read as authentic, peer-validated, and ongoing.

Reddit’s threaded conversations, upvote patterns, and topic communities give models exactly the kind of context their retrieval systems prioritize. The brands earning AI citations are the ones whose community presence and whose location data give models something credible to surface.

What You’ll Learn In This AI Search Webinar

  • The community signals Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews actually weigh, plus which subreddit and content patterns get cited most often.
  • How trusted, structured location data works in tandem with community signals to land multi-location brands inside AI answers.
  • The 5 specific plays multi-location brands across retail, QSR, healthcare, financial services, automotive, and hospitality are running right now.
  • How to scale AI search across dozens (or hundreds) of locations without losing the local voice that makes communities trust you.

About the Speakers

Amanda Kusner, Sr. Solutions Consultant at Uberall, works directly with multi-location enterprises on location data strategy and AI search visibility across retail, QSR, financial services, automotive, healthcare, and hospitality. Peter Wischmann, Senior Sales & GTM Leader at Reddit, brings the platform-side view on how community signals get surfaced in AI search and what brands can actually do about it.

Register Today

If your brand operates across multiple locations and you’re trying to figure out how to land inside AI answers in every market you serve, this session is built for you.

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May 25 2026
Reddit CEO: LLMs ‘Would Not Exist’ Without Reddit Data via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said large language models “would not exist as we know them” without Reddit’s content. He called the platform’s user-generated data “modern oil” for AI.

Huffman made the comments during an interview at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit.

What Huffman Said About Reddit’s Value To AI

Huffman described the position Reddit’s data holds in the AI ecosystem.

Huffman said:

“LLMs would not exist as we know them without Reddit. Reddit is one of the single largest sources of training data for the LLMs and Reddit continues to be one of the primary sources of both training data and we’re also the most cited, the most cited platform across all models.”

He attributed the citation claim to Profound, a firm that tracks AI citation data.

Huffman explained why AI companies depend on the content.

“There’s no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence. At the end of the day, these models are quite simple. They’re regurgitating on an absolutely massive scale what they’ve consumed elsewhere and a large portion of that consumption is actually just the human conversation on Reddit because it’s natural and it covers basically every topic imaginable.”

Deals For Some, Lawsuits For Others

Reddit announced data licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI in 2024. Huffman referenced those as Reddit’s original two AI data deals and didn’t announce any additional agreements.

“Since we did the original two deals with Google and OpenAI, that was over two years ago, so we’ve learned a lot. They’ve learned a lot. The whole world’s learned a lot. Specifically how valuable Reddit’s data is and how useful it is. And so we’re being I think very deliberate and selective there. But yeah, we’re open and open for business.”

For companies that haven’t agreed to licensing terms, Reddit has taken legal action. The company sued Anthropic in California Superior Court, alleging unauthorized use of Reddit content and violations of Reddit’s terms. Reddit filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, along with three data-scraping firms, alleging DMCA anti-circumvention violations and related claims.

Huffman drew a line between the two groups.

“Companies like Google and OpenAI where we had good relationships, we can actually do a deal and put some guard rails on use and access to our data on behalf of our users but then collaborate on making products for the next generation of the internet.”

He added that “not every company is willing to be a collaborative partner and so unfortunately we have to go the other way which is lawsuits.”

Huffman told the audience Reddit’s position on commercial use is simple. “Commercial use of our data requires commercial terms,” he said. Reddit began charging for commercial API access in 2023, a move that preceded the current licensing deals.

Huffman said Reddit still provides free data access to researchers and universities and tries to remain flexible for non-commercial use.

What Changed Reddit’s Openness

According to Huffman, Reddit’s willingness to share data freely changed when the AI industry moved away from open research. As SEJ previously reported, Reddit limited access for many search engine crawlers while Google remained an exception.

“Historically, Reddit has been like we’re born of the open internet and Reddit has been open and very permissive for access to its data. And honestly, I think we would be in a different position today if the AI companies were still basically open and open source and doing open research.”

Huffman said the issue was that Reddit couldn’t longer track how its data was being used. “People are using our data and we don’t know what it was being used for,” he told the audience.

Beyond commercial terms, Huffman said Reddit wants to prevent its data from being used to identify users, target them with ads, or to replace or disintermediate the platform.

Reddit’s Own AI Efforts

Huffman acknowledged what he called a “paradox.” Reddit’s content powers external AI systems, but the company also uses AI across its platform.

The most visible product is Reddit Answers, an LLM-powered search feature. It reads posts and comments, then organizes them into responses built from verbatim user quotes. Huffman noted it’s designed for questions without definitive answers.

“What Reddit Answers does is a couple of things that are unique to Reddit. One, it basically only answers in verbatim quotes from actual people. And then the second thing it does is it tries to present multiple perspectives because the whole point if you’re on Reddit, you want the human perspective.”

Behind the scenes, Reddit uses AI for content moderation and classification. LLMs can evaluate whether a comment crosses into bullying, something Huffman described as previously difficult because of the subjectivity involved.

Huffman presented AI moderation as a way to reduce exposure to the worst content, not as a replacement for Reddit’s community moderation model.

“The worst job on the internet used to be looking at the worst content on the internet and deciding whether it could be online or not,” Huffman said. “That job just goes away.”

The Gray Area Of AI-Written Posts

Huffman also addressed the challenge of users writing content with AI tools and pasting it into Reddit. That’s different from automated bot activity, he stressed.

“The most annoying thing that I see not just on Reddit, but all over the internet is somebody who wrote their post or comment with ChatGPT and then pasted it into Reddit. Like, is that a bot? Certainly feels like a bot, but there’s a human behind the idea.”

Huffman cast the issue as one of intent. “It’s very important to us that there’s a human behind the idea, behind the content, behind the prompt,” Huffman said. But he also noted that “the writing sucks” when users rely on AI to compose their posts.

Rather than creating a policy to address it, Huffman indicated Reddit will let its community handle the issue. Users are already downvoting AI-written content and calling it out in comments. Huffman said Reddit will “empower the users more and the subreddits more to just reject that sort of content altogether.”

He compared the broader question to calculators in math class. “Kids these days are just learning how to write with AI. What are we going to do about it?” he said. “We kind of have to learn, I think, along with everybody else.”

Why This Matters

Huffman’s comments reinforce Reddit’s pitch that its user discussions are a core input for AI systems.

The AI-written content problem Huffman described is one SEJ covered as part of a broader YouTube AI slop investigation. Reddit’s decision to let community voting handle AI-generated posts, rather than building detection tools, is a different path than platforms that have deployed automated labeling.

Looking Ahead

Huffman told Fast Company that Reddit is “in the market talking to folks all the time” about new data deals, though he didn’t hint at a third agreement.

Reddit’s lawsuits against Anthropic and Perplexity are both ongoing. The Anthropic case was the subject of a federal court remand hearing in March.

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May 8 2026
From Reddit to Revenue: Building Real Community That Drives Sales and AI Visibility via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

AI search doesn’t pick brands at random. They cite brands with trust signals across multiple channels.

Are you building brand proof in the places AI actually looks to validate mentions?

Do you know which community conversations are shaping what AI says about your category?

Reddit is one of the most powerful and least utilized of those channels.

👆 Register above to watch the exact framework that generated a 2,000% AI visibility boost in just 90 days.

Add 1 Marketing Channel. Earn 2,000% More AI Visibility & Real Revenue.

In this on-demand SEO webinar, Bartosz Goralewicz, CEO of OGS Media, and Brent Csutoras, Reddit Official Advisor and Owner of Search Engine Journal, shared proven strategies for building Reddit community that earns buyer trust, drives revenue, and strengthens your brand’s multi-channel AI visibility.

You’ll Learn:

  • Data on how Reddit fits the AI visibility picture — Why community-driven trust signals are part of how AI tools evaluate brands, and how Reddit presence impacts AI’s required proof-of-trust.
  • How to avoid 7 trust-breaking mistakes — Identify the specific behaviors that destroy Reddit credibility, and what authentic community engagement looks like when it’s working across both sales and AI visibility.
  • The 5-stage Reddit & AI Search framework — Gain access to the exact strategy that drove 2,000% AI visibility growth and six-figure enterprise deals in 90 days.

Register above to watch the 5-stage Reddit & AI search playbook that builds the kind of authentic brand proof AI uses to decide which brands to mention, cite, and recommend.

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Apr 30 2026
How Brands Are Increasing AI Visibility By Up To 2,000% [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

The answer is Reddit, and yes, this 90-day strategy is worth your time.

Most brands treat Reddit as an afterthought.

However, Reddit is where buyers finalize their purchase decisions.

Reddit is where human trust gets built.

Therefore, Reddit serves as a trust signal for how AI search tools determine which brands are worth recommending.

AI Mentions & Cites Brands Based On Trust Signals, Across Channels

When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AIO recommends a brand, it’s drawing on a web of signals that indicate the brand is credible, relevant, and mentioned by real people in real contexts.

Reddit is one of the most authentic of those signals.

Your opportunity: not Reddit instead of other channels, but Reddit as a meaningful addition to the multi-channel trust footprint AI reasons from.

One brand OGS Media worked with saw 2,000% AI visibility growth in 90 days after building a genuine Reddit presence. That’s the strategy Bartosz and Brent are unpacking on May 5.

What You’ll Learn In This AI Search Webinar

  • How Reddit community content contributes to the multi-channel trust signals AI uses to evaluate and surface brands
  • The 5-stage framework behind OGS Media’s 2,000% AI visibility result
  • The 7 most common Reddit mistakes brands make
  • What authentic subreddit engagement looks like when it’s actually working
  • How to find and engage in Reddit conversations that influence both buyers and AI

About the Speakers

Bartosz Goralewicz is the CEO of OGS Media and one of the most experienced Reddit marketing practitioners in SEO. Brent Csutoras is a Reddit Official Advisor and the Owner of Search Engine Journal, with nearly two decades of hands-on Reddit strategy for brands across every major vertical.

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Apr 16 2026
ChatGPT Often Retrieves But Rarely Cites Reddit Pages, Data Shows via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

An Ahrefs analysis of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts found that pages from a dedicated Reddit source were rarely cited in ChatGPT responses, even though they were often retrieved.

Ahrefs highlights this pattern in a new report.

What The Report Looked At

Ahrefs examined 1.4 million ChatGPT 5.2 prompts, tracking which pages were retrieved and later cited in the final response. About half of the retrieved pages were cited overall.

The citation rate varied by source, with pages from general web searches cited most frequently. In contrast, pages from a Reddit source, described by Ahrefs, were cited only 1.93% of the time. This highlights the Reddit gap: while the Reddit source was often retrieved, it rarely appeared as a visible citation.

The Reddit Finding

Of all the pages retrieved but not cited in Ahrefs’ dataset, 67.8% originated from the specific Reddit source Ahrefs identified.

Ahrefs writes that ChatGPT “is using Reddit extensively to understand topics, gauge consensus, and build context—but it almost never gives Reddit the credit.”

One point to clarify is that Reddit pages can still be cited by ChatGPT when they appear in standard web search results. The 1.93% figure refers to what Ahrefs calls a separate Reddit source, distinct from general web searches. In May 2024, OpenAI and Reddit announced a data partnership granting OpenAI access to Reddit’s data.

What Does Help A Page Get Cited

Ahrefs examined how closely page titles and URLs aligned with the specific sub-questions generated by ChatGPT during the search process. To do this, Ahrefs used open-source tools to compute similarity scores, approximating ChatGPT’s internal matching process. Pages with higher scores for matching those sub-questions were cited more frequently in the dataset.

When ChatGPT Search responds to a prompt, it often breaks the prompt down into several narrower queries and searches for pages related to each. In Ahrefs’ data, titles and URLs matching these narrower queries had a stronger correlation with citations than pages that only broadly matched the original prompt. URL structure also played a role. Pages with clear, descriptive URL slugs were cited about 89.78% of the time they appeared in search results, compared to 81.11% for pages with less descriptive URLs. This aligns with SE Ranking’s analysis, which found that ChatGPT tends to favor URLs describing broader topics over those focused on a single keyword.

Why This Matters

Ahrefs data indicates that Reddit’s impact on answer development differs from what businesses might anticipate. It appears Reddit can shape answers indirectly without being explicitly cited. This kind of influence is still important, but is more about the upstream effect rather than direct citation acknowledgment.

For clear citation credit, Ahrefs’ data shows the best indicator is whether your page titles and URLs align with the specific sub-queries that ChatGPT Search produces from a prompt. Simply matching the broad keyword doesn’t suffice.

Looking Ahead

The study evaluates ChatGPT 5.2 on desktop in February 2025. Since then, OpenAI has launched several model updates, such as the GPT-5.3 Instant transition, which Resoneo links to a 20% decrease in the number of cited domains per ChatGPT response. It’s uncertain whether the Reddit gap and title-matching patterns observed by Ahrefs still apply to these newer models.

Featured Image: Koshiro K/Shutterstock

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Apr 9 2026
Your Owned Content Is Losing To A Stranger’s Reddit Comment via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

The next time you ask an AI what product to buy, which agency to hire, or which software platform actually works, pay attention to where the answer comes from. Increasingly, it does not come from the vendor’s own website. It comes from a stranger’s Reddit comment written eighteen months ago, upvoted 847 times by people who tried the thing themselves.

This is not an accident. It’s architecture.

The Reddit Effect

The financial architecture behind Reddit’s presence in AI answers became public in early 2024. Google signed an initial licensing agreement with Reddit worth a reported $60 million per year, with total disclosed licensing across multiple AI companies reaching $203 million. That arrangement gave Google real-time access to Reddit’s posts and comments for training its AI models and powering AI Overviews, and the terms are now being renegotiated upward. Reddit executives have said current agreements undervalue the platform’s discussions, which now fuel everything from ChatGPT to Google’s generative answers.

The citation data confirms how central Reddit has become. Between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit was the most cited domain in both Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the second most cited source in ChatGPT, trailing only Wikipedia. In Google’s AI Overviews specifically, Reddit citations grew 450% between March and June 2025. A separate study from early 2024 found Reddit appearing in results more than 97% of the time for queries related to products and reviews.

Reddit’s visibility in traditional search has fluctuated over this period, with organic rankings dropping noticeably in early January 2025. But its foothold in the AI answer layer has proven more durable than its SERP position, because these are different systems pulling from the same data source. Reddit’s hold on the AI layer reflects something structural about the content itself, not just a licensing arrangement.

Why Community Signals Work For AI

To understand why community platforms have become load-bearing infrastructure for AI answers, you need to hold two ideas at once.

First, community signals enter AI systems through two distinct pathways, not one. In the parametric pathway, community content gets baked into model weights during training and becomes part of what the model knows before anyone types a query. In the retrieval pathway, community content gets pulled in real time through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) when the model needs current, specific, or contested information. Brands absent from community platforms before a model’s training cutoff face a significantly harder problem than brands simply absent from recent crawls. They are invisible at both layers simultaneously.

Second, the quality filtering that community platforms apply, through upvotes, accepted answers, reply chains, and sustained engagement, functions as a proxy signal that training pipelines have learned to weight. OpenAI’s training data hierarchy explicitly places Reddit content with three or more upvotes at Tier 2, directly below Wikipedia and licensed publisher partners. A heavily upvoted Reddit thread is treated as more credible input than most published content on the open web, because it carries the accumulated validation of hundreds or thousands of independent human judgments.

When multiple independent voices converge on the same recommendation across a thread, that convergence pattern looks different to a retrieval system than a single authoritative publication making the same claim. It is the AI equivalent of a strong link graph, distributed and uncoordinated agreement that no single actor manufactured. About 48% of AI citations now come from community platforms like Reddit and YouTube, with 85% of brand mentions originating from third-party pages rather than owned domains. The model is telling you something about where it trusts the signal.

The Manipulation Risk

Any system that rewards community consensus will attract people who want to manufacture it, and this one is no exception. The SEO parallel is exact: The same logic that made link spam profitable for decades is now making fake community engagement attractive to anyone who understands how AI systems weigh these signals.

The Trap Plan incident in late 2025 is the clearest recent case study. A marketing firm posted approximately 100 fake organic comments promoting a game on Reddit, then published a blog post documenting the campaign’s approach. The screenshots circulated everywhere. The post was ultimately deleted, but the reputational damage was not. A thread naming the company indexed in Google and sat in search results alongside legitimate coverage, visible to every potential customer searching the brand.

The detection infrastructure is more robust than in the early link spam era. Reddit’s automated systems flag coordinated inauthentic behavior through patterns in posting timing, account age, karma accumulation, and comment structure, and moderator communities actively watch for coordinated campaigns. The community itself maintains a strong norm against manufactured consensus, and the backlash when a campaign is exposed tends to be proportional to how authentic it claimed to be.

There is also a structural dimension that goes beyond individual campaigns. Research by Originality.ai found that 15% of Reddit posts in 2025 were likely AI-generated, up from 13% in 2024. That is not just brands gaming the system. It is a broader contamination of the community signal itself, creating a feedback loop where AI trains on Reddit content that increasingly contains AI-generated material designed to look like human consensus. The argument for building authentic community presence now, before detection systems become more aggressive about filtering synthetic signals, is a strategic one, not a moral one. Manufactured signals degrade faster than authentic ones, and the penalty when they collapse is worse than the benefit while they worked.

What Brands Should Actually Do

The practical implication is not “post more on Reddit.” It is more precise than that.

Monitor brand mentions across Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, and review platforms not as a reputation exercise but as entity intelligence. The narrative that forms in community discussions, the specific language, the repeated associations, the persistent objections, is the narrative AI systems are more likely to reproduce than anything on your own website. If community threads consistently describe your enterprise product as “great for small teams,” that characterization will surface in AI answers regardless of how your positioning page reads.

Ensure subject matter experts are participating in relevant communities under their real identities, contributing answers to questions they actually know well. The upvote accumulation those answers generate is a durable quality signal that persists across training cycles. One genuinely helpful response in a relevant technical subreddit or a well-supported Stack Overflow answer does more long-term structural work than ten pieces of owned content, because it carries community validation that owned content cannot provide.

Create content that community members actively want to reference. Original research, specific benchmarks, documented case studies with real numbers, these are the formats that generate organic community citations, which in turn generate the kind of third-party mentions that AI systems treat as consensus rather than marketing. A practical rule of thumb that holds in community engagement generally: 80% of participation should contribute genuine value with no promotional intent, and the 20% that mentions your product should only appear when it is the honest answer to the question being asked.

Think of community presence as a context moat with a long construction timeline. Unlike most marketing assets, authentic community reputation compounds slowly and is genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate quickly. A brand that has been a good-faith participant in its relevant communities for two years has something that cannot be acquired in a quarter.

The Review Layer

Most brands managing reviews understand that aggregate star ratings affect purchase decisions. Fewer understand that the specific review content, the language customers use, the features they praise or criticize, the comparisons they draw to competitors, is increasingly the raw material for how AI describes your brand at the moment of recommendation.

The numbers make the stakes concrete. Domains with profiles on review platforms have three times higher chances of being chosen by ChatGPT as a source compared to sites without such presence. In a G2 survey of B2B software buyers in August 2025, 87% reported that AI chatbots are changing how they research products, and half now start their buying journey in an AI chatbot rather than Google, a 71% increase in just four months. When a procurement director asks an AI to recommend CRM options for a 50-person team, the answer draws from review platform content, not from vendor websites.

Here is where the landscape shifts in a way that most review management programs have not caught up with yet. Not all review platforms are accessible to AI retrieval systems, and the differences are significant.

A June 2025 analysis of 456,570 AI citations found that review platforms divide into three distinct categories based on crawler access policies. Platforms like Clutch and SourceForge allow full crawler access, and their content surfaces regularly in AI-generated answers. Platforms like G2 and Capterra operate with selective access that permits some retrieval. Major platforms (Yelp is an example) block AI crawlers at the robots.txt level, which means reviews written there, however numerous or positive, are structurally unavailable to AI retrieval at the point of recommendation.

The citation data reflects this directly. For Perplexity, 75% of review site citations in the software category come from G2. Clutch dominates AI citations in the agency and digital services category. The market prominence of a review platform and its accessibility to AI crawlers are different variables, and review management strategy that conflates them is directing effort toward platforms where the AI visibility signal cannot be retrieved regardless of review volume.

This is not an argument that major platform reviews are worthless. They still matter significantly for direct consumer decision-making, traditional search, and brand reputation overall. It is an argument that the AI visibility value of a review depends specifically on whether the platform permits retrieval, and that understanding has material consequences for where teams prioritize cultivating review volume when AI answer visibility is the goal.

One additional layer of complexity: robots.txt compliance among AI crawlers is not guaranteed. Analysis by Tollbit found that 13.26% of AI bot requests ignored robots.txt directives in Q2 2025, up from 3.3% in Q4 2024. The boundary between “blocked” and “accessible” is not as clean in practice as it is in policy. The implication is to treat your entire review footprint as potentially accessible to AI retrieval while being deliberate about which platforms receive active cultivation for AI visibility specifically.

The Broader Picture

Community presence has always been a trust signal. What has changed is that the systems making purchase recommendations at scale are now reading those signals directly, at the platform level, and weighting them above the content brands produce about themselves.

SEO professionals who have spent years optimizing owned content for search visibility now face a layer of visibility that operates on fundamentally different inputs. The link-building parallel is not rhetorical. Just as the profession eventually accepted that links from authoritative external sources outweigh on-page optimization in many contexts, the community signal layer is demonstrating the same dynamic for AI-generated answers. Authority comes from outside the brand’s control, which means the work of building it looks less like content production and more like sustained, authentic participation in the places where buyers actually talk.

The brands that start building authentic community presence now are constructing a signal that compounds. Genuine community reputation is difficult to manufacture at scale, genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate quickly, and structurally favored by the same AI systems that are increasingly the first stop in the purchase journey. Later entrants will find it expensive to match.

If you want to learn more about topics like these, take a look at my newest book on Amazon: The Machine Layer: How to Stay Visible and Trusted in the Age of AI Search. It’s written to help you not only understand the topics I write about here, but also to help you learn more about LLMs and consumer behavior, build ways to grow conversations within your organization, and can serve as a workbook with multiple frameworks included.

More Resources:

Featured Image: ginger_polina_bublik/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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Feb 10 2026
Make 2026 The Year Your Business Thrives On Reddit [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Yes, yes we all know customer behavior is changing and Reddit conversations showing up in

AI search is a big part of that shift. What are you doing about it?

If your Reddit marketing strategy hasn’t evolved since 2024 (or you don’t have one to start with), you’re not just behind. You might be actively harming your brand.

We’re past the point of debating whether brands should be on Reddit. That part’s settled. This session is about how to navigate Reddit the right way.

And, we’re going to show you exactly how to do it! I am super excited to bring back our Reddit expert, and SEJ owner/advisor, Brent Csutoras. Bring your notepad and start flexing those fingers, because you’ll have plenty of inspiration and action items after this one!

Learn From Someone Who’s Navigated It All

On February 24, join Brent for a live presentation showcasing how brands can have success. And, we’ll be doing live Q&A at the end, so bring your specific burning questions.

With nearly 20 years on Reddit and experience building authentic presence for brands like Purple, Asurion, and TikTok, Brent understands what communities respect and what they reject. These are frameworks built from real campaigns, real mistakes, and real results on a platform where communities can smell fakeness from three subreddits away.

What You’ll Learn

How karma and authority actually work now
The mechanics changed, and what used to build credibility can now destroy it. You’ll learn the new rules for establishing authority without triggering Reddit’s detection systems.

Brand representation without the astroturfing accusations
Reddit communities have gotten better at spotting fake engagement, and they’re not shy about calling it out publicly. Discover how brands are building genuine presence, when to be transparent about who you are, and how to navigate the line between wanting to be your typical salesy brand versus a thought leader they want to hear from and engage with.

Why your brand needs its own subreddit and how to run it right
Owned subreddits have become critical infrastructure for Reddit success. Learn what makes brand subreddits work, how to build engagement that communities want to participate in, and the common mistakes that kill momentum in that first 90 days.

Who Should Attend

This webinar is essential for marketing directors, social media managers, and brand strategists who recognize Reddit’s importance and are looking for the playbook to do it successfully.

If you’re at a B2B SaaS company or consumer brand trying to prove Reddit’s value to leadership, this session will give you frameworks for measuring real impact on the customer journey and building authentic presence that communities respect.

Walk Away With Updated Frameworks

This isn’t a session about Reddit basics or generic social media strategy. This is up-to-date, specific guidance on what works right now.

You’ll leave with actionable frameworks you can implement immediately, a clearer understanding of how to measure Reddit’s true influence on your business, and the confidence to build a presence that drives quality traffic.

Register for the webinar and ask your questions live! Learn how to be a part of the community conversations and thrive on Reddit this year.

I can’t wait to see you there!

Save Your Spot
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Jan 6 2026
Reddit Introduces Max Campaigns, Its New Automated Campaign Type via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

Reddit is rolling out Max campaigns, a new automated campaign type now available in beta for traffic and conversion objectives.

The launch comes as Reddit continues to see strong advertiser momentum, supported by rising daily active users and rapid growth in conversion activity.

While automation is now standard across most paid media platforms, Reddit is positioning Max campaigns as a way to simplify campaign management without asking advertisers to operate with limited visibility into performance or audience behavior.

How Reddit Max Campaigns Work

Max campaigns are designed to reduce setup complexity and ongoing management by automating several decisions advertisers typically make manually.

This includes the following, all within guardrails defined by the advertiser:

  • Audience targeting
  • Creative selection and rotation, placements
  • Budget allocation

The system is powered by Reddit Community Intelligence™, which draws from more than 23 billion posts and comments to help predict the value of each ad impression in real time. These signals allow campaigns to adjust delivery dynamically as performance data changes, rather than relying on static rules or frequent manual intervention.

Max campaigns also introduce optional creative automation tools. Advertisers can generate headline suggestions based on trending Reddit language, automatically adapt images into Reddit-friendly thumbnails, and soon will be able to use AI-based video cropping to more easily reuse video assets from other platforms.

In the announcement, Reddit reports that more than 600 advertisers participated in alpha testing. Across 17 split tests conducted between June and August 2025, advertisers saw an average 17% lower cost per acquisition and 27% more conversions compared to business-as-usual campaigns.

In one example, Brooks Running reported a 37% decrease in cost per click and 27% more clicks over a 21-day campaign without making manual changes.

Why This Matters For Advertisers

Platforms like Google and Meta have spent the last several years pushing advertisers toward AI-driven campaign types that consolidate targeting, creative, and bidding into a single system. Performance Max, Advantage+, and similar offerings have become the default recommendation for scaling efficiency.

Reddit’s Max campaigns follow that same directional shift, but with a notable difference in emphasis. Where Google and Meta largely optimize toward outcomes while abstracting audience detail, Reddit is attempting to pair automation with clearer audience context.

On Google and Meta, advertisers often evaluate AI campaigns based on aggregate performance metrics alone, with limited insight into who is driving results beyond high-level breakdowns. Reddit is positioning Max campaigns as a way to automate delivery while still helping advertisers understand which types of users are engaging, what they care about, and how conversations influence response.

Top Audience Personas reflect this approach. Instead of relying solely on predefined segments or modeled interests, Reddit uses community and conversation signals to surface patterns in how real users engage with ads. These insights are not meant to replace targeting decisions, but to inform creative strategy, messaging, and where Reddit fits within a broader media mix.

For advertisers who have grown cautious of automation that prioritizes efficiency at the expense of understanding, this added layer of insight may be the differentiator.

What Advertisers Should Do Next

Max campaigns are now available in beta for traffic and conversion objectives to select advertisers, with wider access expected over the coming months. Top Audience Persona reporting is scheduled to roll out shortly after.

For advertisers already running Reddit campaigns, this is best treated as a controlled test. Running Max campaigns alongside existing setups can help clarify where automation improves efficiency and where hands-on input, especially around creative and community fit, still matters.

Advertisers coming from Performance Max or Advantage+ should expect familiar mechanics, but different signals. Reddit’s value is tied to conversation and context, so creative testing and message alignment will likely play a larger role than pure audience tuning.

As with any beta, things will change. The near-term opportunity is not just performance lift, but learning how Reddit’s version of automation behaves and where it fits alongside other AI-led campaigns in a broader media mix.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Oct 24 2025
Perplexity Responds To Reddit Lawsuit Over Data Access via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Reddit sued Perplexity and three data-scraping firms in New York federal court, alleging the companies bypassed access controls to obtain Reddit content at scale, including by scraping Google search results.

Perplexity posted a public response, saying it summarizes Reddit discussions with citations and doesn’t train AI models on Reddit content.

The position is consistent with the company’s past statements. Whether it addresses the specific allegations in Reddit’s filing remains an open question.

The complaint names Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi as intermediaries. It alleges Perplexity is a SerpApi customer and purchased and/or utilized SerpApi services to circumvent controls and copy Reddit data.

Evidence In The Complaint

Perplexity’s argument is built around a technical distinction. The company says it summarizes and cites discussions rather than training models on Reddit posts.

Perplexity wrote in its Reddit response:

“We summarize Reddit discussions, and we cite Reddit threads in answers, just like people share links to posts here all the time.”

The complaint, however, presents technical claims that call that framework into question.

According to the filing, Reddit created a test post that was only crawlable by Google’s search engine and not accessible anywhere else on the internet. Within hours, that hidden content appeared in Perplexity’s results.

The filing also says that after Reddit sent a cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased roughly forty-fold.

Similar Accusations From Publishers

Forbes previously accused Perplexity of republishing an exclusive and threatened legal action.

Wired reported that Perplexity used undisclosed IPs and spoofed user-agent strings to bypass robots.txt. Wired’s

Cloudflare later said Perplexity used “stealth, undeclared crawlers” that ignored no-crawl directives, based on tests it ran in August.

How Perplexity Has Responded

In previous disputes, Perplexity said issues stemmed from rough edges on new products and promised clearer attribution.

The company has also argued that some media organizations are trying to control “publicly reported facts.”

In this latest response, Perplexity frames Reddit’s lawsuit as leverage in broader training-data negotiations and writes:

“We summarize Reddit discussions… We won’t be extorted, and we won’t help Reddit extort Google.”

Why This Matters

This issue matters because it concerns how AI assistants use forum content that your audiences read and that publishers frequently cite.

The legal questions go beyond just training.

Courts may examine if technical controls have been bypassed, whether summarization infringes on protected expressions, and if using third-party scrapers could lead to legal liability for downstream products.

If courts accept Reddit’s anti-circumvention argument, it could lead to changes in how assistants cite or link Reddit threads.

On the other hand, if courts agree with Perplexity’s viewpoint, assistants might start relying more on forum discussions that are less restricted by licensing.

What We Don’t Know Yet

The filing alleges Perplexity obtained data via at least one scraping firm, but the public complaint doesn’t specify which vendor supplied which data or include transaction details.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Oct 17 2025
Why Authority In Online Communities Such As Reddit And Quora Matters via @sejournal, @rio_seo

Online communities have infiltrated the internet, appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for most queries. They play an integral role in shaping brand perception, purchasing decisions, and search visibility.

Reddit now sees more than 110.4 million daily users and 416.4 million weekly active users. Quora, on the other hand, also receives an impressive amount of traffic, with over 400 million active users flocking to the website monthly. Undoubtedly, online communities present an impressive opportunity, yet many marketing leaders have yet to capitalize on it.

This substantial shift towards interest in participating in online communities presents both an opportunity and a risk. Positive benefits a brand can receive from building authority in online communities include enhancing SEO performance, improving share of voice, and delivering real market intelligence. But participation without a solid strategy in place can backfire, damaging reputation in spaces where skepticism runs high and negative sentiment spreads like wildfire.

This article explores why it’s essential to build authority in Reddit and Quora, the brands that got it right (and wrong), and how to operationalize community authority as part of a broader marketing and SEO strategy.

Reddit Marketing Strategy: Building Authority In The Hardest Community

Reddit is one of the most difficult places for marketers to master. It’s a forum where trust is increasingly difficult to earn, and if a brand is perceived as disingenuous or inauthentic, it can be downvoted into obscurity quickly. Reddit community members are quick to express their thoughts about anything and everything, especially when it comes to brands that overtly try to advertise there.

Communities (which are known as “subreddits”) are moderated by members, not brands, and those members are quick to identify anything that sounds too promotional or tone-deaf. They also have the power to ban members entirely from participating in the subreddit. It may sound daunting to engage a Reddit audience; however, the brands that do earn credibility reap the rewards that extend well beyond the platform.

Case Study: Spotify’s AMA Success

Spotify is a prime example of how to master Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion format. Spotify employees frequently leverage AMA to solicit feedback from users to improve its technology or to address tough technical questions, rather than hard sell playlists or subscriptions.

The result? Thousands of upvotes and long-tail SEO value that still lives on today in popular subreddit communities. Spotify openly invited users to engage directly with the team behind its recommendation engine, and users have a lot to say.

Spotify doesn’t have its marketers join the AMA conversation, but rather engineers who play an active role in how Spotify’s technology works. In turn, Spotify was able to build trust with an audience that might otherwise dismiss a “brand presence” as self-serving, as the SERPs for continued visibility.

For example, a Spotify engineering manager recently asked for users’ input on Spotify’s Lossless feature. The Reddit thread received 1,500 upvotes, four awards, and 451 comments, highlighting the power of engaging with a motivated and receptive community.

Case Study: Woody Harrelson’s AMA Failure

Unfortunately, AMA doesn’t always go according to plan. Perhaps one of the most infamous examples of an AMA gone wrong is with actor Woody Harrelson’s in 2012, which was a prime example of what happens when marketers ignore Reddit’s norms.

Harrelson promoted his film instead of answering questions, which caused a negative chain reaction. The actor received myriad downvotes, ridicule, and lasting negative press. To this day, this specific AMA is often referenced as a cautionary tale of when advertising goes awry.

Read more: Reddit Subreddits To Google Search: Maximizing Your Brand’s Impact

Why You Should Prioritize Reddit

Reddit and Quora, once fringe discussion boards, are now rife with chatter that is actively shaping brand perception, purchasing decisions, and trust. Reddit’s massive potential can no longer be ignored for the following reasons:

SEO Value

According to recent research, the “Discussions & Forums” SERP feature appeared in 7,085 out of the 10,000 studied product-review searches, which equates to about three-quarters (70-75%+) of the time.

Consumers are actively seeking validation before committing to a purchase, and surfacing at the top of the SERPs is a great way to build trust and authority with searchers.

Marketing Funnel

Shoppers are overwhelmed with a plethora of choices. Any time they seek a product or service, there are myriad vendors to vet.

Reddit’s own research states that Reddit is the No. 1 platform where people go to explore possible solutions to their needs, making it a powerful tool for discovering products. Additionally, 71% of people who discovered a brand online or off went to Reddit to conduct their research. 74% of people agree that Reddit assists them in making faster purchase decisions.

Trust Building

Research reveals that over three-quarters (77%) of consumers are willing to spend their money to support an authentic brand over one that’s not. Additionally, Reddit recently reported that 88% of social media users turn to Reddit for purchase decisions, and 76% believe Reddit posts are more honest and truthful than those on other social platforms.

With more users trusting Reddit over other platforms, the opportunity is to empower subject matter experts, engineers, executives, and other powerful voices within their organization to share original insights, host AMAs, and engage authentically with Reddit community members.

Read more: AMA Recap: Reddit Leadership On Leveraging The Platform For Business Success

Quora Marketing Strategy: Long-Tail Authority That Compounds

Quora is an entirely different online community that requires its own distinct strategy. Reddit thrives on thoughtful debate, engaging discussion, and subcultural context, whereas Quora looks for depth, expertise, and intellect.

Quora’s algorithm looks for long-form content and authoritative answers that provide substantial context, cite credible resources, and solve the reader’s challenge succinctly. For example, an in-depth, 1,000-word response that reveals relevant and helpful information will typically outperform a low-effort, dull response.

Like Reddit, Quora also has unique SEO advantages. Thought-provoking, highly regarded content has staying power in the SERPs. Investing in Quora can offer online visibility across numerous platforms, helping boost brand recognition and build long-lasting search equity. Additionally, given the shift in how businesses are appearing in the SERPs with the rise of AI, research from Semrush found that Quora is the most commonly cited website in Google AI Overviews.

Case Study: Staggering Success For CodingNinjas

Quora users don’t want to feel as though they’re shouting into a void. They crave connection, conversation, and relevant responses to their inquiries. CodingNinjas does just that, using Quora in a highly strategic way. After noticing early leads originating from Quora, the team continued to invest in answering questions related to their services and competitors. The result? Within a year, Quora became their No. 1 source of qualified leads, driving consistent organic traffic and improved search engine visibility.

Success came with testing the length of answers as well as aligning with keywords, which helped CodingNinjas determine which content resonated best with their target audience. They found writing content that addressed the final stages of customer awareness, such as solution and product-focused questions, performed best and produced the highest conversions.

CodingNinja’s success highlights how strategic participation in Quora can help boost search visibility and strengthen domain authority through authentic, value-driven writing. Just like Reddit, the better your responses, the better your chance of succeeding in building authority on Quora.

Case Study: Outsourcing Gone Wrong

Outsourcing is a tactic to avoid when engaging with Quora and Reddit community members. Companies that delegate Reddit or Quora participation to third parties often lose brand tone and voice in their responses (see the Woody Harrelson example above). The result is templated, generic responses that often violate community rules and can even lead to bans. Reddit and Quora users actively look for credible, well-cited answers that those who are unfamiliar with your industry and brand may not be able to provide.

Companies that outsource Quora participation often receive unhelpful, keyword-stuffed answers that don’t match brand content standards. In turn, this content can be flagged for low quality and remain unseen by Quora users because of this. Many times, consumers can see through the intent and effort behind these posts and will downvote the content. In some instances, it may result in account suspension, wasting time and money, while also harming credibility.

Why You Should Prioritize Quora

While Reddit is well-known for sparking heated debates and quick responses, Quora rewards depth, expertise, and length. With hundreds of millions of visitors frequenting Quora, the opportunity is to convert these motivated searchers into customers. Here are a few reasons why brands should prioritize Quora:

Search Visibility

Unlike posting on social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Quora content has the potential to deliver value for lengthy periods of time. As aforementioned, Google’s AI Overviews tend to pull authoritative and quality Quora responses, placing content front and center at the moment searchers are looking for relevant content.

A single, in-depth answer can get eyes on it for years in the SERPs, attracting high-intent searchers long after publication, extending the content’s mileage and funneling a continual stream of new visitors. Quora acts as an evergreen asset, making it a compounding investment that can pay off well beyond its initial posting and a strong potential revenue resource. In comparison, paid ads or sponsored social posts may drive impressions but disappear quickly, offering little lasting equity.

Executive Visibility

For executives looking to boost their digital presence and share their wealth of expertise, Quora is one of the strongest methods for engaging curious consumers.

For CMOs, there’s a clear incentive to position themselves and other leadership team members as authoritative voices on an influential platform. When a CMO, product lead, or engineer answers a strategic question like “What is the future of AI in marketing technology?”, your answer holds weight and doesn’t just position your brand as a thought leader; it also enhances the individual’s personal credibility and positions them as an expert voice on the topic.

The dual benefit – strengthening your company’s reach and authority as well as your thought leaders – makes Quora a powerful and investment-worthy channel for marketing to focus on.

Longevity

A single thought-provoking answer on Quora can consistently attract high-intent readers who are seeking a trustworthy resource to solve their challenge. Alternatively, a sponsored LinkedIn post may receive ample attention but disappear from people’s feeds and minds almost immediately after reading.

Content Pipeline

A high-performing Quora answer may be repurposed into longer form content to get the most mileage, such as a blog post, social media carousel, ebook, and more, helping fuel your content pipeline with high-performing insights. Longer-form content tends to perform better on Quora (1,000+ word answers), so it’s important to focus not only on the quality of your answer but also the length.

How To Make Authority In Online Communities Your Next Competitive Advantage

Given the influx of answers available online for any query, visibility is no longer the determinant of success. Visibility without trust doesn’t retain customers. In online communities, where skepticism is abundant and trust is fleeting and fickle, authority is what ultimately wins.

The lesson is apparent: Online communities can’t be treated as marginal and shouldn’t be forgotten. They must be treated with the same fervor and effort as other more traditional marketing strategies, such as email and pay-per-click advertising. Authority is a strategic asset, one that influences consumers early on in their journeys with your business. Building solid trust extends the lifetime of your customers and turns them into brand advocates.

Authority in online communities is one of the best ways to build trust in an increasingly skeptical consumer purchasing landscape and can:

  • Strengthen E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Create long-standing, evergreen search assets.
  • Position your brand as a trusted authority in places where consumers are actively seeking advice and reassurance.

The brands that will conquer online communities in the future aren’t chasing volume; they’re seeking authentic relationships and building trust in a highly scrutinized marketplace.

As AI-generated content and recommendations continue to infiltrate the SERPs and, in turn, grow consumer distrust, the brands that build their authority in online communities today will be the ones who own the conversations in the future.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

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