Reddit for organic and AI search: 7 ways to build visibility

Reddit can put your brand in front of potential buyers in places you may not control — from search results and AI answers to conversations that influence B2B buying decisions. But getting value from the platform takes more than posting about your brand.

Jules Davies, founder of B2B SaaS marketing agency Scalerrs, shared the playbook his company uses to help dozens of clients improve organic traffic and revenue — from finding the right communities and threads to building trusted accounts and measuring results.

Here’s how his team approaches Reddit and how to tell whether the platform is worth the investment for your company.

1. Map SEO keywords to subreddits before you post

The SEO team identifies 200-500 keywords per client and then cross-references them against Reddit to find communities that already exist around those topics. For B2B SaaS, that comes to about 150 subreddits.

They recommend finding threads on those topics because those threads are what will rank.

2. Only engage in threads under 20 days old

“If the thread’s more than 20 days old, we are not going to touch it,” said Leigha Henderson, who leads an eight-person Reddit marketing team at Scalerrs. “That conversation has come and gone.”

One reason is to avoid getting banned. Reddit’s systems now treat engagement on old threads as unnatural, and it is “the easiest flag Reddit has right now” for removing comments, according to Davies.

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

3. Warm the account before mentioning your brand

“It’s cool for a Redditor to also work at a company and then engage on Reddit,” said Davies. “It’s not cool for someone who works at a company to then create a Reddit account and get engaged on Reddit.”

Moderators read comment history. The strategy is to leave helpful comments on marketing tips, executive assistant questions, and whatever else is genuinely useful on the account long before they mention a product.

4. Answer the original poster’s question completely, then leave

Henderson’s test for a comment is whether it will answer a prompt someone will type into ChatGPT later.

Brands should adopt a helpful persona: “We’re here to help, here’s the answer that you wouldn’t have gotten unless you were the CMO at this company,” she said. “And then we get out of there as fast as possible.”

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

5. Write like a Redditor, not a blogger

Share real stories and experiences, and be on Reddit to serve, not just promote.

Henderson says that on Reddit, “The ‘E’ in ‘SEO’ stands for ‘emotional.’” A blog would say, “Here’s how to save $10,000 a year on insurance,” whereas the Reddit version would be, “You’re losing $10,000 a year, by the way.”

Also, warns Davies, don’t hand Reddit to your social media manager and call it a day. They might create something more polished, which isn’t suited for Reddit.

6. Start threads only when the account has earned it

Original posts are not easy to pull off with a public account, according to Davies. The account needs to be trusted by the community first.

If you are going to try original posts, try these two formats: an Ask Me Anything (AMA) or a pain-point post — “We’ve seen lots of our customers have this problem, here’s how to fix it.”

Here’s a great example of an AMA thread:

It can be even harder to build trust with owned subreddits. Davies said owned subreddits work for roughly 30%-40% of their clients and only when the community was built around an underserved niche topic.

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

7. Search your brand name on Reddit every day

Henderson’s number one tip for any brand is to search your brand name every day to see what’s going on.

Take LastPass, for example. They had major security incidents in the past, and a community on Reddit kept threads alive telling people not to use them. Those threads now rank for the brand name and get pulled into ChatGPT answers. Yikes.

Should your company even bother to use Reddit?

Reddit is a secondary priority that only pays once your own site is already worth citing, according to Davies. After trying this myself, I agree with him.

Having an SEO and AI search presence and your own content marketing program on your website are must-haves, he said. Once you’ve done that and have the capacity, budget, and mental bandwidth, then pick up Reddit.

A situation that is likely to fail is when one person on a big team dabbles on it for an hour a week.

Also, according to him, the clients who successfully brought Reddit in-house already understood the platform.

Davies suggests asking yourself three questions to see whether you should run Reddit in-house or hire an agency:

• Does someone on my team already understand Reddit as a user?
• Can we allocate their time?
• Does that make sense at their pay grade?

Dig deeper: 5 steps to building Reddit authority for Google and ChatGPT visibility

How to measure Reddit success

When it comes to AI search, the most important thing to measure is whether the threads you touch get cited. This is Henderson’s number one goal for clients.

Her team tracks target prompts in a visibility tool, or conducts a manual AI visibility audit if you don’t have a tool budget. They see what share of answers pull from Reddit and then check if a thread they’ve been working on is being pulled.

The best-case scenario is when an AI answer cites a client’s blog post, product page, and Reddit thread together. The more likely scenario is a citation of one of those.

Reddit isn’t easy, according to Davies. I agree, to a point. It takes real time and effort to learn.

But there is an easy, no-risk step you can start with: Open Reddit, search your brand name, and sort by “new.” Whatever you find is what your next buyer or client, and their AI assistant, will likely find. How’s it look?