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Welcome to Volume 266 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 📈 How Clarify Turned LinkedIn Into Its #1 Lead Machine
- 📊 Reddit is Now the #1 Most-Cited Source in AI Search
- 👀 The Latest in B2B SaaS This Week
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
- 📣 We’re Hiring: Check Out Our Open Positions!
Let’s get into it.
📈 How Clarify Turned LinkedIn Into Its #1 Lead Machine
Most B2B brands treat LinkedIn like a link-dumping ground: share a blog post, add a generic caption, listen to the crickets chirping.
Clarify took a different approach.
And now LinkedIn is their top inbound lead generation channel — a feat achieved in just six months.
Here’s what makes this remarkable: LinkedIn accounts for just 5.5% of Clarify’s total web traffic, according to SimilarWeb, behind direct (40%), organic (22%), and paid (17%). But that 5.5% is driving their highest-quality inbound leads, proving that traffic volume doesn’t equal impact.
Their Marketing Lead, Chris Eberhardt, recently shared the systematic playbook that made it possible. It’s not magic — it’s smarts and commitment that any B2B brand can replicate.
In our latest breakdown, we unpack Clarify’s framework with insights from Foundation’s social content experts:
- Treat LinkedIn like its own channel: Stop repurposing blog posts. Respect the platform’s culture with the “4 E’s” framework — Educate, Entertain, Engage, Empower.
- Build a content supply chain: Extract executive wisdom at scale through weekly 30-minute interviews that generate weeks of authentic, spiky content.
- Organize with clear taxonomy: Balance personal narrative, business narrative, industry commentary, and news reactions to avoid random posting.
- Prioritize creator partnerships: Choose LinkedIn collaborations over newsletters — 75% of marketing leaders say creators build authenticity.
- Activate employee advocacy: Empower your team, don’t control them. Personal profiles get exponentially better reach than company pages.
- Double down on winners: Systematically identify high-performing content and recycle winning angles with new data.
Small traffic percentage, massive lead quality.
Read the full breakdown on Foundation Labs to see the complete playbook for turning LinkedIn into your #1 inbound source.
📊 Reddit is Now the Most-Cited Source in AI Search
Reddit has officially become the most influential source shaping what AI tells people about your brand.
New research from Profound and Reddit analyzed over 4 billion AI citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other major AI platforms. The findings confirm what we’ve seen over the last year at Foundation:
Reddit is the single most-cited domain, capturing 3.11% of all citations. That’s 45% more than YouTube (2.13%) and more than double Wikipedia (1.35%).
Reddit ranks #1 on Perplexity and #2 on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Grok. The increase for Reddit is particularly interesting when you see how far Wikipedia has fallen over the last 6 months:
The Profound team’s hypothesis behind this is that AI models treat Reddit as the “human layer.” They prioritize unfiltered, experience-driven conversations over marketing content. The data shows AI seeks helpfulness over popularity, balanced honesty over hype, and treats niche subreddits like r/BuyItForLife as authoritative sources that often outrank official brand sites.
With 60% of searches now ending without a click, visibility has moved from ranking in SERPs to owning citations in AI answers. The average cited Reddit post is one year old, proving this is a long-term play, not a viral moment strategy.
As Profound’s Josh Blyskal notes: “Your site has the specs. Reddit has what people actually think. ChatGPT needs both.”
The brands building Reddit authority today will own AI recommendations for years.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
🔍 What Triggers AI Overviews? 86 Factors and 146 Million SERPs Analyzed | Ahrefs
💸 Groww raises nearly $750M in IPO as India’s retail investing boom continues | Tech Crunch
🔔 Asian travel platform Klook is filing for a New York IPO | Fortune
🤖 ElevenLabs is launching a consent-based AI cloned celebrity voice marketplace. | Mashable
🚨 New Podcast Alert: Reddit Marketing, AI Distribution & Building in Public
In the latest episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Founder and SEO expert Caleb Turner joins Ross to unpack the strategies that are actually working right now for building a personal brand and winning in an AI-dominated digital landscape.
This episode is packed with tactical advice for anyone building a digital marketing business or trying to grow their influence in 2025. Ross breaks down exactly how to show up on Reddit without getting banned, why comprehensive digital presence beats SEO, and what it takes to make the leap from employee to entrepreneur.
Here’s what Ross and Caleb cover:
- The entrepreneurship mindset: Learning that control over your time and life is more important than money. Business is art, and entrepreneurship is creative freedom.
- Launch your digital presence now: Get FirstnameLastname.com, invest in brand identity (logo, photos, LinkedIn), and start creating content aligned with your values.
- Reddit marketing decoded: AI trusts Reddit more than blogs. Start with social listening, build karma through value posting, and use Reddit ads strategically to re-engage.
- How to show up in AI search: Contribute to high-authority sites, create YouTube content, answer Reddit questions, and get cited in forums and newsletters. Your own website isn’t enough anymore.
- Mentorship at scale: Ross shares how he learned from digital mentors before ever meeting them, and how you can do the same.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcast or Spotify to get the exact playbook for building your brand and staying visible in an AI-driven world.
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
In the marketing world, the impact of LLM-based tools is often talked about from the perspective of writers and designers. It’s understandable considering we’re often the first people on the chopping block.
AI has also completely changed how people approach the creative process, especially in a business context where waiting for inspiration to strike or writer’s block to pass simply aren’t options.
The words (or images) need to come in on time, whether they come from a human mind or a complicated algorithm.
But there’s another group that’s equally, if not more, impacted by the increase in AI-assisted writing: editors.
Earlier this week I came across this scroll-stopper from Rhonda Bradley: “a lot of editors are quietly drowning right now.”
She calls out how the “streamlining” of creative workflows with AI often offloads the hard work of structuring ideas and narratives to the editors who typically focus on clarity and strategy.
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t passed along one of these “painfully generic” drafts to my own editors over the last few years.
Let this be a reminder to send some appreciation to your overworked editors and make sure to take a second look at those drafts before you send them along.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🏅 Reddit Post of the Week
What’s the most underrated digital marketing channel right now? In r/AskMarketing
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
What I am about to say may surprise you: The marketing funnel has been irrelevant since 2009. by Deborah Carver
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- Report Links Original Research to Higher B2B ROI | Search Engine Journal
- Authenticity is the new currency in B2B | Conversations with Reddit
- All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives | Wired
- ChatGPT ads are coming – and they won’t look like Google Ads | Search Engine Land
💻 Job Postings Worth Checking Out
Looking for a new opportunity? Here’s a round-up of some exciting job openings in the B2B SaaS space.
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Account Manager
- Foundation Marketing | B2B Creative Director
- Foundation Marketing | Reddit Specialist
- Foundation Marketing | Content Creator
- Foundation Marketing | Strategic Editor
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Content Strategist
- Foundation Marketing | Executive Marketing & Outreach Assistant
Want us to include your job postings in our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS professionals today.
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email me at ethan@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and provide the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend!
