Reddit Marketing Guide: Why Brands Are Using Reddit In 2025

For years, Reddit has quietly been an under-utilized marketing channel, but recently, it has officially become a powerhouse in search visibility and truly the front page of the internet. 

Recent Google algorithm updates have skyrocketed Reddit’s prominence in search engine results (SERPs), making it an essential platform for brands to consider in 2025 and beyond.  If you’re a marketer – keeping Reddit off your radar could mean missing out on significant growth opportunities of this new age.

This post will break down exactly why Reddit is reshaping the buyer’s journey and provide a tactical framework to help your brand win on Reddit. Over the last few months, we’ve analyzed over 50,000 threads on Reddit, analyzed over 30,000 SERPs, used LLM tools to understand the sources of the responses to their questions and so much more. I’m the founder of Foundation, a Reddit Marketing Agency, I developed my first Reddit marketing strategy in 2014 and pressed publish on a book called “Cracking The Reddit Code” in 2015 which featured some of the top brands and was bought by some of the best at Reddit today. 

I’m excited to press publish on what I believe is truly Ultimate Guide to Marketing On Reddit…

It’s a guide that I wish I had back in 2016 when I first started marketing on this channel.

It’s an evolution of what I already wrote about Reddit in Create Once, Distribute Forever…

And it’s a guide I’m excited to share with all of you. Let’s get into it:

Why Reddit Matters More Than Ever  

Let’s start by talking about the realities of how Reddit has changed the way we interact with the internet.

As of today, Reddit’s Daily active users climbed 31% to 108.1 million and Reddit said advertising revenue rose 61% to $358.6 million thanks to higher impressions and increased ad prices. The CEO recently said:

Over 400 million people now come to Reddit each week—because when you want real opinions, you turn to real people.

Reddit’s been gaining serious traction in Brazil lately. Daily active users there just hit an all-time high, with usage up nearly 80% year-over-year. A big reason for the international growth? Improved machine translation.

It’s making it easier for more people around the world to jump into Reddit threads and actually participate.

The Machine Translation efforts have been happening on Reddit since 2024 and the results are paying off:

One of the elements that is also important to take note of is the difference between logged in vs logged out daily active users. A lot of the people who browse through Reddit on a daily basis are people who don’t actually log in or set up an account. I pulled this chart from the Lurkers Subreddit which shows that 55% of Redditors don’t actually log in at all:

Why does this matter?

Because for brands… It’s important to know that your audience is likely being influenced by Reddit content whether they have an account or not. So while they might not say “yes” in a survey to being a Reddit user… It’s possible that they are in fact using Reddit every other day simply to consume content and not log in and engage.

Reddit’s SEO Surge: SERP Dominance

As of April 2025, Reddit is the #2 most visited site via search traffic in the United States. Second only to Wikipedia and surpassing YouTube with SERP visibility. According to Ahref’s data more than 600M queries are resulting in traffic to Reddit threads for people using Google throughout the US.

For example, if you take the time to type in “best coffee machines” in Google you will be met with a SERP that is filled with Reddit. Today, it’s estimated that over 49,000 people look for the best coffee machines on Google every single day. The top ranking URL in the SERP at the time of this publication is a Reddit thread followed by two others:

Below the primary Reddit thread is a “Discussions and Forums” featured snippet which pulls three different comments from one single thread on Reddit. The more queries you look at in the SERP… The more you will see Reddit is starting to show up in the SERP for almost every single industry.

Why the prominence?

In early 2024, Google signed a content licensing deal with Reddit worth about $60 million per year.

This agreement is believed to have given Google access to Reddit’s corpus for training its AI (beyond what Google’s normal web crawler could gather). The deal underscores Reddit’s new stance that big AI firms should pay for its data. In fact, Reddits CEO was quoted calling out other companies who were attempting to use their data in an earnings call / report:

“Reddit will continue to block AI companies, including Microsoft, from scraping data on its site until it is paid and has an explanation on how the content is used.”

But this isn’t the only reason why Reddit is showing up in the SERP so frequently.

Over the last few years, people have become so frustrated with the number of listicles that don’t add value to their lives. As such, people have started to modify their own search queries to include the word “Reddit” to help them land on threads that are coming directly from people. As an example, the SERP below shows that 2,900 searches happen every single month for the query “mattress reddit” and mattress companies are willing to spend $2.28 per click to get these visitors:

When it comes to showing up for valuable space in the SERP:

Reddit is winning in a real way.

Here’s a look at the total value of the traffic that Reddit is capturing for transactional and commercial intent queries. Reddit is ranking in the SERP for over 5.7 million different keywords that have transactional and commercial intent:

Brands historically have captured traffic for these types of queries by creating “Best” or “Top” oriented content…

Now… Reddit is taking a lot of the value for these queries.

Google has prioritized Reddit content in search results due to increasing frustrations with low-value SEO content and the rising trend of users appending “Reddit” to their searches (e.g., “best CRM software Reddit”).

In short:

Reddit is now competing with traditional review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor…

And in B2B competitors like G2, Capterra, and even brand-owned websites are losing SERP visibility to Reddit. The data aligns with this: 

In May 2024, Capterra was one of the leading websites for commercial and transactional intent keywords in software. Today, the number one most trafficked site from organic search is Reddit and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

With high-value discussions happening daily across thousands of niche subreddits, Google views Reddit as a goldmine of authentic user discussions, making the platform more visible than ever in search results. 

In fact, when conducting an analysis of 1Password’s digital marketing strategy we found that nearly 50% of all their social referral traffic was coming directly from Reddit:

It makes complete sense.

People who think about secure passwords are likely relying on Reddit to understand the best tools and solutions.

And people who work in cybersecurity are definitely on Reddit.

Here’s a look at the /r/Cybersecurity Subreddit which happens to have over 1.2M members at the time of this post:

Still not convinced that your audience is on Reddit?

Here are a few other metrics surrounding the size of some niche communities that might be relevant to you:

• /r/Entrepreneur  – 4.7M Members
• /r/Sales – 472k Members
• /r/Marketing – 1.8M Members
• /r/PPC – 211k Members

And trust me…

There’s more.

And you should know that it’s not just B2B brands being impacted by the rise of Reddit. One of the most significant competitors for the New York Time’s Wirecutter section is now Reddit with over 5.5M keywords overlapping:

From coffee machines to sunglasses:

Reddit is ranking in the SERP for hundreds of keywords that Wirecutter is also trying to rank for:

And it’s very likely…

That Reddit is ranking for keywords that you would like to rank for as well.

Reddit’s LLM Impact

OpenAI’s language models have leveraged Reddit content as part of their training data.

OpenAI’s earlier GPT models were partially trained on Reddit data, which helped provide natural conversational text. Today, the rise of “search” and “Deep Research” on Reddit has made Reddit an even more important solution when it comes to influencing the responses.

If you ask for a cheap coffee machine or a coffee machine built to last to ChatGPT, you will very likely be met with a response like the one shown below:

Reddit is a source for both of these queries.

For example, OpenAI’s GPT-2 used a corpus of web pages found via Reddit (the WebText dataset), and later models continued to benefit from Reddit-sourced text. In 2024, OpenAI even entered a licensing partnership with Reddit to officially use Reddit content via Reddit’s API for training ChatGPT. This deal made OpenAI an approved Reddit data partner (including becoming a Reddit advertising partner) and followed Reddit’s move to monetize its data. OpenAI historically scraped Reddit for free, but now has a paid agreement to access fresh Reddit content for model training.

ChatGPT isn’t the only LLM that believes that Reddit is worth scraping for answers. The team at Profound conducted an analysis of responses coming from Perplexity and found that Reddit was the primary source for most queries:

At an event called BrightonSEO, the Profound team also shared this list of sources that are relied upon by Google AIO. According to their dataset, the vast majority of the queries relied on YouTube but the split across most channels was pretty similar at large with Reddit in the top five sources for LLM responses:

So why does this all matter?

More and more search experiences online are being influenced by AI and the responses from AI are being influenced by Reddit.

The Buyer’s Journey Now Includes Reddit

In B2B marketing, we often discuss the complex and nonlinear buyer’s journey—ranging from reading white papers and comparison pages to watching YouTube videos and attending webinars.  Here’s how I like to position the buyers journey today when I’m having conversations with people thinking about Reddit in the B2B journey: 

We’ve all seen the classic funnel.
We’ve all mapped the buyer journey.

But if you’re not factoring Reddit into your GTM or content strategy, you’re missing where buyers are actually making decisions.

Let me explain.

Today’s B2B buyers aren’t just reading whitepapers and watching webinars.
They’re on Reddit.

They’re scrolling r/sales, r/ITManagers, r/startups, r/entrepreneur, r/digitalmarketing asking brutally honest questions:

Here’s the thing:

The post above has 22 comments and over 63 upvotes…

The # 1 answer on that thread very likely had 10-20 demo requests that day but these moments don’t show up in your CRM.

Why?

Because there’s no link in that comment. The user likely opens a new tab and goes to their domain or goes to Google, clicks the top link and lands on the page.

Here’s how Reddit shows up across the modern B2B buyer’s journey:

→ Problem Unaware: A trending thread sparks curiosity.
→ Problem Aware: Someone vents in a subreddit — it triggers a team-wide investigation.
→ Solution Exploration: A buyer asks Reddit to compare vendors (and trusts the responses more than G2 or Capterra).
→ Requirement Development: Internal teams vet solutions based on Reddit commentary, even during procurement.
→ Supplier Selection: One final Reddit search gives them the confidence — or concern — to sign or stall.

I’ve seen threads get shared in Slack channels.

I’ve seen Reddit comments quoted in stakeholder meetings.

I’ve seen million-dollar vendors win or lose based on what’s said in r/sysadmin.

And the wild part?

Most brands aren’t even watching Reddit…

Let’s talk about how to get started:

The Reddit Growth Framework for B2B Brands 

To effectively incorporate Reddit into your marketing strategy, you’ll need to follow a strategic and community-driven approach. Here are the key steps:  

Strategic Reddit Research: How to Do It Right

If you want to win on Reddit, don’t start by posting.

Start by paying attention.

Reddit is a network of micro-communities. Each one has its own culture, tone, and unwritten rules. To succeed, you need more than content—you need context.

Here’s how to get it.

Getting Set Up Correctly

There’s no perfect way to go about creating your company accounts for Reddit.

Here’s two examples of how it can be done from Supernote and Sonos:

Supernote takes ownership of its presence by being visible and active as the moderators of their own subreddit.

Their employees are listed by name and title, often participating directly in threads and offering support.

This model works well if:

• You already have an active Reddit community

• You want to lead the conversation

• You’re comfortable being transparent and available

Option B: The Sonos Approach

Sonos employees show up in an unofficial capacity, participating in a subreddit they do not own.

Their flairs identify them as employees, but they engage like regular users—offering advice, solving problems, and being helpful without controlling the space.

This model works well if:

• Your brand is still earning trust on Reddit

• You want to avoid heavy-handed promotion

• You’re contributing to an existing community

Either approach works as long as you show up with authenticity and respect.

Just don’t treat Reddit like another broadcast channel. It’s a conversation.

Choose the Right Voice and Identity

Before you post, decide:

How will your brand sound on Reddit?

• Will you speak through a founder’s voice?

• Will you rotate team members in with flaired accounts?

• Will your presence be centralized under a single brand handle?

Reddit favors human, first-person voices. The more your account sounds like a real person and not a brand guide… The better you’ll do at not risking being banned and blocked from the site.

Yes. It can happen.

Our advice:

Write like you’re helping a friend in a group chat or sending an email to your closest colleagues and peers.

Find or Create A Powerful Subreddit

You might first be wondering:

What is a Subreddit?

This is where everything starts.

A Subreddit is a community on Reddit that people can join to discuss a shared interest or brand. For example, in the images above there are a handful of Subreddit targetted towards these brands. Most of them are run by the brands themselves yet for some brands – the Subreddit was created before they could join and as a result, it’s owned by the community while official employees are simply members of the community.

PRO TIP: Go look into whether or not your company Subreddit exists…

If it doesn’t: Create it.

What Goes Into Your Own Subreddit?

A Subreddit is a community on Reddit where people come to discuss a shared interest or topic. Brands can take ownership of the dialog associated with their brand by creating their own Subreddits like the examples above and below. The ClickUp Subreddit is a great example of a Subreddit built with brand excellence top of mind.

Clear and Aligned Branding

The subreddit features ClickUp’s logo as the profile image and a branded banner with product UI visuals and tagline (“The everything app, for work”).  As best practice, organizations should maintain brand consistency by using your official colors, fonts, and taglines. This builds trust and signals authenticity to Redditors who are often wary of corporate presences.

Concise and Strategic Sidebar Content

 The sidebar explains what ClickUp is, who founded it, and why it matters — while linking to the official site.

• Best Practices:

  • Include a short brand summary with a clear value proposition

  • Add important links (e.g., website, help docs, contact).

  • Mention subreddit rules, support disclaimers, or if it’s moderated by the company directly.

Strong Community Moderation and Tagging System

Tags like “Announcement” help users immediately distinguish official updates.

• Best Practices:

  • Use post flairs (e.g., [Feature Request], [Bug Report], [Tips], [Announcement]) to help with content organization.

  • Have at least 2–3 moderators familiar with both Reddit culture and your product.

Use “Community Highlights” to Surface Important Content

Key product announcements (e.g., “Introducing ClickUp Calendar” and “Subfolders Feature Request Update”) are pinned in the Community Highlights section.

• Best Practices:

  • Use pinned posts or community highlights to showcase big updates, feature launches, changelogs, or AMAs.

  • Rotate regularly to keep things fresh and relevant.

User Support & Self-Service Clarity

Users often ask platform-specific questions (e.g., “Can I upgrade to Unlimited without affecting my team?”), highlighting the subreddit’s role as a community help desk.

• Best Practices:

  • Encourage peer-to-peer support while linking to official help docs when needed.

  • Set expectations on what kind of support can (or can’t) be offered by brand staff in the subreddit.

Community Guidelines that Encourage Contribution

Most successful branded subreddits define clear posting rules (e.g., no spam, how to submit feature requests, tagging bugs properly). The rules that ClickUp uses (see the screenshot above) are aligned with best practices.

It’s also best practice to ensure that Mods are clearly identified as a part of your Subreddit.

• Best Practices:

  • Write clear, non-restrictive rules that empower users to share their experiences, issues, and wins.

  • Include a pinned “How to Use This Subreddit” guide.

Leverage Reddit’s Native Features (Polls, AMAs, etc.)

ClickUp Potential: They could host AMAs with PMs or engineers around feature updates or future roadmap items.

• Best Practices:

  • Engage the community using Reddit-native tools like:

    • Polls to prioritize features

    • AMAs with your CEO or product team

    • Contests or Challenges around creative use cases

  • Promote these events cross-channel (LinkedIn, newsletters, etc.)

How To Get Value From Other Subreddits

Subreddits are where you’re going to go for research.

Go beyond Reddit’s search bar while it’s a great starting point for many there are tools like RedditList, Subreddit Stats, or GummySearch can help you uncover active, engaged communities.

And here’s the trick:

Don’t stop at the obvious.

If you sell marketing software, sure, r/software might help—but r/startups, r/saas, or even r/bigseo could be more active and better aligned with your audience’s mindset.

Your goal:

Find where your audience actually spends time, not just where you think they do.

One of my favorite tools to do this is SparkToro. You can type in the domain of your website or competitors and the tool will give you a list of the SubReddits that those site visitors browse regularly. It also provides you with insight into the most watched YouTube videos and podcasts of these site visitors which ultimately translates nicely into more content you can use to better understand what they want.

This is all about finding the channels your audience browse regularly and then using that to uncover content-market fit. Here’s a snapshot from SparkToro’s Reddit experience for Inc.com Readers:

So now that you know where your audience is…

What do you do next?

The same thing content creators (who are good at their job) have been doing for decades:

Create High-Value, Community-Driven Content  

The biggest mistake marketers make on Reddit?

Posting low-effort, promotional content.

Here’s a sample from a few years back of some content that I created that made the front page of /r/Entrepreneur and drove a ton of sales:

You might be thinking:

Okay Ross. That worked three years ago… Would it still work today?

Well, here’s a post from 2025 where I created an ultimate guide to Pizza in my hometown:

It had over 40,000 views, 100 upvotes and 127 comments.

Not bad eh?

I’m pretty sure someone reading that thread made the decision to buy pizza when that post went live. Here’s what you can learn from it:

Redditors are notoriously skeptical of marketing, so the key is to publish content that is:  

✅ Genuinely valuable—Think deep insights, how-to guides, and expert breakdowns
✅ Highly tactical—Practical, well-researched ideas that solve real problems
✅ Formatted for Reddit—Short, punchy paragraphs, bullet points, and engaging headlines  

How do we do this for clients?

We combine our own deep understanding of their community through research with our deep understanding of storytelling. It’s from this combination that we’re able to create content on Reddit that delivers results and builds community rather than drive rejection and bans.

Our team has been publishing content on the internet for over a decade and this content has reached millions of people around the globe. This understanding makes it easier for us to create content that resonates on Reddit for our clients.

When Should You Post Content On Reddit?

This heatmap from RecurPost illustrates the best times to post on Reddit based on user engagement throughout the week. The darkest shades represent peak engagement, showing that the early morning hours—particularly between 6 AM and 10 AM EST from Monday to Saturday—tend to generate the highest interaction.

Engagement is strongest on Tuesdays and Saturdays around 6–9 AM, with a secondary spike around noon.

Activity drops significantly in the late evening and early morning hours (12 AM to 4 AM), suggesting those are the least effective times to post. Marketers and content creators aiming for maximum visibility should prioritize early weekday mornings to align with peak Reddit activity.

Seed & Share Content in Relevant Subreddits  

Our research found that across almost every subreddit, the majority of the content that is shared on Reddit is links.

This should scream opportunity.

You can do a site search today and on Reddit and see how often your domain has been shared and talked about:

We did this type of analysis for a client a few years ago and it was WILD to see that every other year they had one piece of content go viral consistently. Most companies sleep on this reality. Smart companies recognize that people stay relatively the same and the stories that went viral back in 2019 will go viral again in 2029.

The key?

Resubmitting these assets to the community and letting people discover it for the first time.

Find subreddits where your ideal customers are active and engage with those communities before sharing content.

Building trust is essential.

For example:  

– If you’re in SaaS marketing, contribute to r/SaaS andr/digitalmarketing
– A cybersecurity company? Engage in r/cybersecurity
– A project management tool? Participate in r/projectmanagement  

Ensure your content aligns with the subreddit’s culture and adds value before dropping a link. 

Afraid of being met with crickets initially?

Over the last few years, a lot of brands have started to use Reddit influencer marketing tools like Crowdreply or Launch Club AI to augment their work with influencer interaction. Networks like these can be great amplifiers of the work you’re doing on Reddit.

Leverage Reddit Ads & Data-Driven Insights 

Remarketing on Reddit is absurdly underused.

And for brands already getting traffic from Reddit (organically or through ads), it’s one of the easiest wins out there.

Reddit users are lurkers. They research. They dig deep. They click, compare, bounce, come back later. So when someone visits your site from Reddit, that’s a high-intent signal wrapped in anonymity. But most brands don’t even have a Reddit pixel in place to catch that signal.

Here’s the kicker: Reddit allows pixel-based retargeting, just like Meta or Google. That means:

• If someone reads your post on r/Marketing, clicks through to your SaaS site, and leaves… you can follow up with a custom Reddit ad tailored to their visit.

• If a user browsed your pricing page from r/SmallBusiness… you can retarget them with a testimonial carousel from actual Reddit users.

• If they hit your blog from a Reddit search thread… you can show them a free toolkit or lead magnet in their feed the next day.

You’re not starting cold—you’re reconnecting with someone who already showed interest in a research-heavy environment.

Reddit retargeting works especially well because:

1. The ad inventory is cheaper than Facebook or LinkedIn.

2. You’re targeting users by behavior, not by subreddits, so even if they came in through a comment, you still have reach.

3. You can keep it native—Reddit-style ads, Reddit-style headlines. No need for high production, just high relevance.

If you’ve got Reddit traffic but no pixel in place, fix that yesterday.

Reddit Ads, when executed properly, can drive targeted engagement in strategic subreddits.

Financial brands, for example, are running ads in r/FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) communities to reach high-value audiences.  

Wrapping It Up: How To Go From Here

Reddit is no longer just a curiosity:

It’s a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

What once felt like a niche forum for internet insiders is now one of the most influential platforms shaping purchasing decisions, brand perception, and SEO visibility. Whether you’re selling enterprise software, home gym equipment, or financial services, your future customers are already discussing your category, and maybe even your product on Reddit.

The question is: are you listening?

This guide was built to help you not just understand the Reddit landscape but to act on it. To move from lurking to leading. To stop treating Reddit as an afterthought and start treating it as an essential layer of your content, community, and conversion strategy.

Because here’s the truth:

If you’re not in the thread, you’re not in the conversation. And if you’re not in the conversation, you’re already losing the sale…

Reddit won’t reward lazy marketing.

But it will reward brands that show up with clarity, value, and respect for the community. If you’re willing to do the work to engage authentically, contribute meaningfully, and experiment thoughtfully I’m confident you’ll unlock one of the most underpriced and underutilized growth channels available today.

The window is open. The traffic is there.

Go make Reddit a lever.

Not a liability.