CMOs are frantically asking "What's our Reddit Strategy?!" because of misleading charts

Reddit is a long-game channel that works best when done organically. If you're jumping on the Reddit hype train for "LLM optimization" you're too late.

Yes, Reddit is exploding. Nothing new.

Search for any bottom of funnel software query and you’ll find Reddit in the top ranking positions. In this example for [best DLP tools] Gartner and Reddit have massive influence.

This is a common scenario where “voice of the customer” largely dictates who gets recommended based on actual peer reviews. Not growth hacks or SEO tricks.

Misleading charts are causing executives to have Reddit FOMO

Charts like the one below are incredibly misleading.

CMOs will post it in Slack: “What’s our Reddit strategy?!”

My friend Alex Birkett summarized this problem perfectly:

Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube are heavily cited by LLMs because they are massive websites with a topical footprint that spans into a million different areas.

Therefore by default, Reddit gets tons of LLM citations. The same goes for Wikipedia and YouTube.

It’s like claiming “Spaghetti Carbonara is the top eaten dish in Italy” — yes, it dominates because it occurs everywhere.

Side note: Clients are not pressing me for a YouTube strategy, yet they are gunning for Reddit.

Reddit is a high effort, low upside channel for most brands

Misleading charts touting Reddit’s LLM influence causes marketing whiplash aka “random acts of marketing” where teams get distracted by shiny objects rather than prioritizing what drives the highest impact.

To quote my friend Alex again:

This data is very low signal as an input to organic growth strategy for a given brand. In other words, massively pivoting resources and focus to these large surface areas is low expected value and has little alpha.

This post by Erwan Gauthier from Lemlist revealed the results from their Reddit experiment, documenting the long-term path to upside and frustrations along the way.

Finding relevant threads on Reddit exposes how narrow the opportunities are

A simple exercise is to pop Reddit.com into Ahrefs or Semrush and filter by URLs in the top 10 positions containing your desired topic.

In this case, there are 11 Reddit pages with an estimated monthly traffic of 19.

Tools like Scrunch AI expose Reddit’s true influence on LLMs for your target category

For this particular client I am monitoring 300+ custom prompts which are generating thousands of LLM responses.

However, when filtering by Reddit there are just two threads that are responsible for the majority of responses and citations.

This is a far cry from the data that’s being promoted by SEO research studies.

Attempting to “game” Reddit doesn’t work

There are several problems with attempting to game Reddit for LLMs:

Most of the high ranking threads are closed / archived:

Meaning you cannot comment or manipulate them. Here are a few examples:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/18fg2x0/what_dlp_are_you_using/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1ig60de/what_do_people_look_for_in_an_insider_risk/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1cyt246/employee_monitoring_softwares/

Reddit moderators are picky, fickle and easily angered:

• Back to the Lemlist example: several of their posts were taken down, and not because of spam — but because the format looked too much like marketing.

You need someone with a real, legitimate profile:

• Outsourcing Reddit doesn’t work. You need to build real Karma and “street cred” by leaving meaningful contributions over time.

• Daryna from OpenPhone has a masterful case study on how to do founder-led Reddit marketing that I’d encourage everyone to read.

Newly opened threads quickly get overloaded with spammers:

• Just read this brilliant post by Lars Lofgren: The Sleazy World of Reddit Marketing Where Everything is Fake

Posting on Reddit is not an SEO strategy

“Posting on Reddit” isn’t an SEO strategy—it’s shouting through a bus window, hoping to join the conversation. At best, it’s a short-term hack; at worst, it wastes time and risks backlash.

Yes, AI search engines sometimes cite Reddit, but it’s misguided:

• Communities often view brand posts as astroturfing (there’s even a whole subreddit, r/hailcorporate, calling this out). That can seriously damage your reputation.

• It’s a tactic, not a strategy. Dropping posts and hoping they stick doesn’t ladder up to meaningful business goals. It’s cereal-box marketing.

Reddit SEO agencies are thirsty

This is an actual pitch one of my clients recieved. It’s vague, unclear and doesn’t offer any way to even remotely measure success.

At the very least, they should have provided some recommendations for success metrics re: generating profile karma and engagement.

Reddit results need to be earned legitimately

Reddit success is often the downstream effect of having a great brand with an awesome product that people love.

Reddit has too many anti-spam mechanisms, reinforcing there are no shortcuts in this game—Reddit results need to be earned legitimately.

With that said I’ll recommend this awesome Reddit Marketing guide from Backlinko that offers a great playbook for how to do Reddit the right way.

To close out, this post from my friend Joe Manna sums it up perfectly.