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Hi, Krista here. Last month, you may remember I sent an email announcing I’d be rebooting my AI newsletter, “Not Another AI Newsletter”, to talk more about the changes in AI search.

Over the past month, I’ve talked to 20+ heads of marketing, community, and SEO and every single one of those convos had one major pain point threaded throughout:

“We know Reddit is really valuable for AI search visibility and reputation, but we have no idea where to start.”

Marketers know Reddit’s importance as a marketing channel is increasing, but it’s also a tricky channel to navigate. It’s part search, part community, part social, part content strategy. And unlike users on other social platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (still not calling it X, be blessed), Redditors are uniquely allergic to brands who are overtly promotional or are trying to take more from the communities than they give.

So, after hearing so much confusion (and so much bullshit, spammy advice from fake gurus), I’ve decided to really focus in on the Reddit aspect of AI search, marketing, and community moving forward, both for this newsletter and for my clients.

What to expect:

Moving forward, this newsletter will be all Reddit education, all the time. Over the next few weeks, we’ll start with 101-style breakdowns of the actual opportunity Reddit offers, and move into some actionable lessons to help you get started and learn how to Reddit responsibly complete with a matching subreddit space you can use as your sandbox.

I’m really excited about it all. Lfg 🥹🫶

TL;DR: Because over the past 1.5 years, Reddit has turned into the backbone of AI search and buyer decisions in general.

As traditional search became less trustworthy with over-optimized affiliate sites, blogs, and comparison pages, people were already turning to Reddit for real opinions and advice. In 2024, it wasn’t uncommon to see major search volume for phrases like “Is [Brand X] worth it Reddit” or “[Brand X] vs. [Brand Y] Reddit”.

It’s no surprise that as AI Overviews and ChatGPT Search rose in popularity, they secured major deals with Reddit to feed threads and subreddits directly into their AI search engines, making it consistently one of the most-cited sources across Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more.

Why should you care about this?

It’s simple: Reddit will decide how your brand is represented across AI search as more people turn to these tools to find answers and make buying decisions. Taking control of your presence there is no longer a nice-to-have, but an investment in your brand’s reputation across the AI search ecosystem.

While AI search was taking over the world last year, another change was a’brewing: People started trusting communities and peer reviews over the traditional influencers of yore not just in search, but in all avenues of the buyer journey.

Buyers now crave messy authenticity, not shiny sponsored content.

While Reddit has always been a place to source reviews and opinions, it has now taken center stage of the core buyer journey as people seek out people, not influencers, especially when making decisions around SaaS tools, fitness and health, parenting, finance, and anything else that feels critical to life and business.

Why should you care about this?

Community mindset is now a non-negotiable. Whether you’re looking to use Reddit for AI search, finding new customers, social listening, or whatever else, you’ve got to learn the basics of community-oriented engagement.

People on Reddit don’t want to engage with brands who come in hot trying to push an agenda. But if you learn to approach it as the person behind the brand looking to help and have fun with the audience you care about, you’ll have a much easier time building trust and goodwill in your chosen subreddits.

When people say they want to do “Reddit marketing”, their goals usually sit in one of these five buckets 👇 Over the next five weeks, we’ll focus on each of these in-depth so you better understand the opportunity for your particular brand.

Like we just talked about, high-performing threads are one of the main citation sources for AI search engines. Like a good blog post that ranks high in traditional search, a solid thread mention that gets served in AI overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity can keep paying dividends for months and years to come.

Organic engagement in existing subreddits is the Reddit marketing use case I see talked about most, and its also the use case I see the most misinformation about regarding various tactics and risks. Engaging where your audience is already hanging out can be a great way to reach your ideal users, but only if done with care and intention.

Reddit can be a wealth of ICP and customer data, making it a great way to track customer pain points, feature requests, and ICP language trends you can turn into copy. These insights can be shared across your entire org to inform marketing and product decisions 🤌

For some brands, it eventually makes sense to start their own branded subreddit. This is a great way to nurture future and existing customers by answering common questions, helping users troubleshoot, announcing new features, and hosting Reddit-native content like AMAs with in-house or industry pros. Bonus: The content in your branded subreddit can also impact AI search!

Reddit is really focused on building out its ad products, offering brands an alternative to advertising on Meta and Twitter. Ads can be a really great way to add an extra punch to your organic Reddit strategy (example: AMA ads let you promote your community AMA and reach a broader audience.)

Next week, we’ll do a deep dive on how to use Reddit responsibly for increasing your AI search visibility. Hope to see you there 🫶

Talk soon,

KD