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Welcome to Volume 267 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 👩⚖️ The Marketer’s Guide to Reddit Moderators
- 💰 Adobe Acquires Semrush for $1.9B to Win the AI Search Era
- 👀 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.
👩⚖️ The Marketer’s Guide to Reddit Moderators
If you don’t understand Reddit moderators, you don’t understand Reddit.
They’re the ones who decide what content makes the cut, what gets removed, and which brands get a fair shot at reaching real communities. And most marketers still treat them like an afterthought.
Reddit now drives more than 600 million monthly searches, influences AI training data, and shapes buying decisions long before customers visit a brand’s website.
Yet the people who control that visibility are volunteers with powerful tools, established norms, and a sixth sense for inauthentic behavior. If you don’t understand the ecosystem they operate in, your content won’t survive long enough for users to see it.
Our latest deep dive includes insights from two Reddit Marketing experts on the moderator ecosystem most marketers don’t understand:
- Why five individuals once moderated 92 of Reddit’s top 500 subreddits (and what changed)
- The technical reality behind moderation — IP tracking, browser IDs, and detection systems that catch manipulation instantly
- The “community karma economy” that determines whether mods trust you or ban you
- A content spectrum from instant removal to genuine welcome
- When to contact mods proactively (and how to do it right)
- Six behavioral guidelines for building credibility instead of destroying your account
Small missteps = permanent bans. Smart strategy = compounding visibility.
Read the complete guide on Foundation Labs to master Reddit’s most misunderstood gatekeepers.
💰 Adobe Acquires Semrush for $1.9B to Win the AI Search Era
Adobe is making a major bet on brand visibility.
The company announced on Wednesday that they are acquiring Semrush — a leading SEO and brand visibility platform — for $1.9 billion in cash. It’s a sign that Adobe is pushing into generative engine optimization (GEO) as CMOs grapple with how their brands appear across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and traditional search engines.
Semrush serves major brands, including Amazon and TikTok, helping them optimize visibility across search and AI platforms. The company recently launched tools specifically designed to measure and improve performance in LLM-generated results — a capability Adobe President Anil Chakravarthy says is “top of mind for every CMO today.”
For Adobe, which has struggled with a 20% stock decline this year, the acquisition represents a strategic answer to the shift from traditional SEO to AI-driven discovery. Combined with Adobe’s Digital Experience suite, Semrush will give marketers a unified view of brand presence across owned channels, earned media, and AI platforms.
The deal is expected to close in Q1 2026, pending regulatory approval — a process Adobe knows well after its $20B Figma acquisition collapsed under regulatory scrutiny in 2023.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
🔌 A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector | The Verge
🤝 OpenAI, Intuit Strike Strategic Partnership | The Wall Street Journal
🔊 Google announces Gemini 3 as battle with OpenAI intensifies | CNBC
📈 As Lovable hits $200M ARR, its CEO credits staying in Europe for its success | TechCrunch
🚨 New Podcast Alert: Why Reddit Is Eating Your Bottom-of-Funnel Traffic
In the latest episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross delivers a wake-up call for B2B marketers still relying on traditional review sites to close deals. G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius are losing the high-intent search battle — and Reddit is winning.
If you’re spending thousands every quarter on legacy review platforms while Reddit threads are dominating “best software” queries and feeding AI answers, this episode will change how you think about bottom-of-funnel strategy.
This episode is essential listening for any B2B marketer who needs to understand where buyers are actually going for product research in 2025. Ross breaks down why Reddit has become more trustworthy than polished review sites, how it’s shaping AI-generated recommendations, and the exact three-step strategy brands need to build an authentic, pipeline-driving presence on the platform.
Here’s what Ross covers:
- The death of traditional review sites: Why G2 and Capterra are losing organic influence as buyers seek unfiltered, real conversations instead of polished testimonials.
- Reddit’s search dominance: How Reddit threads are outranking review platforms for high-intent keywords and becoming the primary source for AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
- The trust factor: Why messy, debate-filled Reddit comments are more influential than curated reviews — even when they’re negative.
- The new buyer journey: How B2B buyers are skipping traditional review sites entirely and making decisions based on Reddit threads and user anecdotes.
- Your 3-step Reddit strategy: Create a brand subreddit, establish an official account with Reddit Pro, and build a branded persona that engages authentically across relevant communities.
- Tactical execution: How to repurpose content, encourage customer reviews on Reddit, and build a valuable community presence without getting banned for corporate spin.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcast or Spotify to learn how to meet buyers where they actually are, before your competitors do.
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
This Friday is National Hello Day — a reminder that connection starts with a simple greeting. But here’s something wild: when you say “hello,” you’re using one of just 20 languages that more than half the world speaks as their native tongue.
According to Ethnologue, there are 7,159 languages actively used on Earth right now. That number shifts constantly as researchers discover new languages and others fade from use. But the distribution is staggering: the world’s 20 largest languages account for the native tongue of 3.7 billion people — nearly half the global population — while representing just 0.3% of all languages.
Apparently, the other 99.7% are spoken by the remaining half of humanity, often in small, fragile communities. Roughly 44% of all languages are now endangered, many with fewer than 1,000 speakers left.
Language is the ultimate network effect in reverse: the more people who speak it, the more valuable it becomes. The fewer who speak it, the faster it disappears.
So this Friday, when you say hello, hola, 你好, bonjour, or one of the thousands of other ways to greet someone, you’re participating in something both ordinary and extraordinary: a living, evolving system that connects us all, even as thousands of voices risk falling silent.
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 are the best marketing automation tools that are helping you save time? In r/DigitalMarketing
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
AI slop shows up in two different ways, but only one gets airtime. by Sally Slater
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- What Losing a 125K-Member Reddit Community Taught Me! The Digital Wake-Up Call I Didn’t See Coming | Hackernoon
- A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On | 404 Media
- Hank Green’s Focus Friend is Google Play’s app of the year | TechCrunch
- How GPT Sees the Web | Dejan
💻 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
Chicken Banana by Crazy Music Channel (Send this to your enemies)
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!
