Reddit is the keyword research tool you’re probably not using

Almost every conversation about Reddit and SEO in the last two years has focused on participation. Should you post? Comment? Pay someone to seed a thread? Build a subreddit?

Those are the wrong questions.

Reddit is a massive repository of ranking data that can reveal what your audience is searching for and where your content falls short.

It ranks for hundreds of millions of keywords, with millions ranking on Page 1. It also surfaces in millions of AI Overview queries. That data is publicly visible in a tool you’re probably already paying for.

You don’t need a Reddit account. You need a Semrush login and about two hours.

I saw this firsthand with an enterprise travel client. Reddit eventually became one of its top three competitors by Organic Share of Voice. A threat analysis uncovered opportunities for net-new content, existing content optimization, and an FAQ library. The client wasn’t even aware of the branded Reddit community around its brand.

The process turns Reddit’s organic footprint into a content roadmap: the questions your audience is asking, the ones your site doesn’t answer, and the ones AI systems are already citing Reddit for.

Why Reddit is worth mining

As of August, Semrush data shows reddit.com ranking for roughly 166 million keywords, including more than 10 million in position No. 1, 31 million in the top three, and 65 million on page one. More than 35 million of those keywords trigger AI Overviews, with Reddit cited in more than 15 million – a 46% citation rate.

Two developments helped drive this:

• Google partnership: Signed in February 2024, the same day Reddit filed for its IPO, and reportedly worth about $60 million a year. The deal gave Google real-time access to Reddit content through its Data API. Reddit’s SERP visibility had already started climbing in late 2023, but the partnership accelerated it. Google’s “hidden gems” and “helpful content” updates were rewarding Reddit even before the agreement.
• OpenAI partnership: Announced three months later and estimated at around $70 million annually, it gave ChatGPT a pipeline into fresher, more conversational content.

The result is a platform that functions as a de facto source of information for both traditional search and generative answers. It’s driven Reddit to become one of the most visited websites on the planet. Its August estimated traffic is now up to 440 million monthly organic visits, according to Semrush.

There’s a wrinkle worth knowing about. In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit was weighing whether to renew its agreement with Google — even considering restricting Google’s structured AI access — because AI Overviews have eroded referral traffic across the web. Reddit’s stock dropped roughly 9% on the news.

The negotiation is ongoing. Reddit’s dominance in the SERP depends in part on business arrangements that can change. That makes the data worth mining now.

Dig deeper: A smarter Reddit strategy for organic and AI search visibility

Reddit as a query layer

When Reddit outranks you for “best running shoes for flat feet,” that ranking is telling you something specific: A real person asked that question in language a real person uses, other real people answered it, and Google decided that exchange was the best available result.

Reddit didn’t win because of technical SEO. It won because it had the answer in a format people trusted. You can’t replicate the format. You can absolutely answer the question.

That’s the whole exercise. Reddit’s ranking footprint is a map of unmet informational demand in your category, already sorted by what Google has decided is worth surfacing.

Before you start, establish whether Reddit is actually a competitive factor in your vertical. Spend 30 minutes running the Domain Overview filter on two or three of your core non-brand themes or terms and look at the raw count. That number tells you most of what you need to know.

Niche B2B, regulated, highly technical, or specific/narrow categories: Reddit’s influence is often muted or more limited. The conversations exist, but they’re small, and Google isn’t ranking them. In those verticals, this analysis will produce a thin list, and you should spend your time elsewhere — but it’s worth doing the analysis first to discover that.

Larger consumer brands, competitive retail, health, finance, software, travel, and anything with an opinionated buying process: Reddit is almost certainly outranking you on hundreds, if not thousands, of queries, and the gap analysis will produce more work than you can staff.

Knowing which one you’re in before you build the deck saves you from presenting a threat that isn’t there.

Dig deeper: Reddit’s AI search influence goes beyond training data

How to mine Reddit’s rankings for content opportunities

You’ll need Semrush. Two reports do most of the work: Domain Overview and Keyword Gap.

Step 1: Pull Reddit’s non-brand rankings in your category

Open Domain Overview, enter reddit.com, and go to the Organic Research report.

Under Advanced Filters, set Include → Keyword → Containing, then enter a non-brand term tied to your products or services. Since I’m an avid runner and did this same analysis for a running shoe company, for this example, let’s use “running” as the main category. Use one core theme at a time, like “running shoe” or “women’s running shoe.”

Apply a Position filter set to Top 10, hit apply, and export to Excel.

You now have every query in that theme where Reddit holds a top-10 position. If the theme is broad and the list is really long, tighten to Top 3 positions. If it’s thin, loosen it. The right cutoff depends entirely on how much volume the topic has.

Repeat for your three to five core non-brand themes. Don’t do more than that on a first pass — you’ll drown in rows before you’ve built any judgment about what matters.

Depending on the industry and niche, this will help identify how much of a threat Reddit is to your brand and industry. Sometimes when I’ve run this analysis, I don’t find anything worthwhile. Other times, I can find tens of thousands of keywords.

Step 2: Isolate the AI Overview layer

This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that pays off in 2026. Reddit consistently shows up in AI-powered search as a cited source.

Stay in the same report. Remove the position filter. Open the SERP Features filter, go to SERP Features on SERP, and select AI Overviews.

Export that list to Excel.

What you’re looking at is every query in your theme where Reddit appears on a SERP that also generates an AI Overview. Reddit is cited in more than 15 million of those queries.

Feed this export directly into your prompt research. These queries are the raw material for the questions you should be testing in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to see whether your brand shows up at all.

Bonus: If you use the custom RegEx to identify potential prompts in the domain’s Google Search Console data, you can marry these two data sets using your favorite LLM. I used Claude.

Dig deeper: How to build an organic Reddit strategy that drives SEO impact

Step 3: Run the branded pass

Now filter for your own brand name and your competitors’ brand names. What comes back is usually one of two things, and both are useful.

• Bottom-of-funnel support content: People asking whether your product is worth it, why a feature broke, how to cancel, or whether a workaround exists. This is a customer support FAQ written by your customers. If Reddit is ranking for “does [your product] work with [integration]” and your own help center isn’t, that’s not a Reddit problem.
• Comparison content further up the funnel: Examples include “[your brand] vs. [competitor],” “[competitor] alternatives,” or “is [your brand] better than [competitor].” These are high-intent queries where a thread of strangers is currently shaping the narrative about your product.

You can’t remove those threads. You can publish something better and get cited alongside them.

Additionally, I would run the branded analysis on three to five of your closest organic competitors.

Step 4: Run the Keyword Gap report

Open the Keyword Gap report. Put your domain in the first field, add reddit.com as a competitor, and keep both set to Root Domain and Organic Keywords. Compare.

Click the Weak tab, set the position filter for competitors to Top 10, apply, and export. Note — you might need to limit it to Top 3 depending on the industry, domain, and volume of keywords. You can also filter by search volume and sort by queries with 100 or 250 average monthly searches or more.

You now have every keyword where you and Reddit both rank, and Reddit ranks better — filtered to positions that actually get impressions.

The Weak tab matters more than the Missing tab. Missing keywords are speculative. You have no proof you can compete, and most aren’t related specifically to your brand, industry, or product. Weak keywords mean Google already considers your page relevant enough to rank. You’re not building from zero. You’re closing a gap on pages that already have a foothold.

Dig deeper: 10 Reddit comment frameworks that drive engagement without sounding like ads

What to do with the exports

Four files, one job: turn them into a topical map. Cluster the non-brand exports by theme and intent, then compare that map against your existing content. 

You’ll typically find three buckets:

• Optimization candidates: You have a page, it ranks, and Reddit ranks better. Usually, the fix is depth and specificity — Reddit wins on the long tail of qualifiers your page glosses over.
• Net-new creation: Reddit ranks, and you have nothing. Prioritize by cluster density, not individual volume. Twenty related questions with modest volume each is a stronger content brief than one head term.
• FAQ and support content: Mostly from the branded pass. It’s fast to produce, disproportionately effective for AI citation, and it takes a conversation currently happening on someone else’s platform and gives it a home on yours.

One tracking note: Add reddit.com as a tracked competitor in Semrush Position Tracking, and — if you’re running prompt-level visibility monitoring in a tool like Peec AI — add it there, too.

What this isn’t

This isn’t a Reddit activation strategy. Nothing in this process involves posting, commenting, seeding, or otherwise participating on the platform. That’s a separate discipline with real risk — Reddit communities are unusually good at detecting and punishing brand astroturfing, and the downside of getting caught outweighs the upside of a well-placed comment.

The exercise here is pure keyword intelligence. You’re using one of the largest ranking datasets in your category to improve your own topical authority on your own domain.

Bonus tip: One valuable Reddit takeaway for your PR and social teams is which Reddit communities and subreddit threads are ranking for your industry and brand.

Turn Reddit’s ranking footprint into a content roadmap

Reddit spent two decades accumulating the exact thing search engines and language models now want most: real people answering real questions in real language.

You can’t buy that. But you can read the map it produced, find the questions your category is asking, and answer them better on a property you actually control.

Start with the threat assessment. Then run the gap. What content do you need to add? What content do you need to optimize?