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Welcome to Week 2 of the new format.
Last week we covered what happens when a brand tries to game Reddit instead of earning its place. This week, we’re zooming out with the data behind why Reddit matters so much in the first place.
🎙️ Upcoming Event: The State of AI Search — Ross Simmonds x Reddit for Business
Our CEO Ross is partnering with Reddit for Business to break down how LLMs decide which brands to surface — and what marketers can do about it right now. He’s bringing new research, new data, and new tactics on the role of UGC and community content in AI visibility. If this week’s newsletter hit a nerve, this session goes deeper.
👉 Register for the free webinar
Reddit Is Outranking Every B2B Vendor. But One Vertical Fights Back.
What’s happening
Everyone in B2B marketing has the same complaint right now: “Reddit threads are outranking our product pages.” We’ve heard it in every Slack channel, every strategy call, every conference hallway conversation.
So we stopped guessing and pulled the data.
Our team analyzed 8,566 keywords across 14 major SaaS domains in four verticals — SaaS Platforms, Sales Tech, Review Sites, and UCaaS — to measure exactly how often Reddit is beating vendors in organic search.
The headline: in three of four verticals, Reddit holds 40–45% of top-3 SERP positions. Across the full dataset, 4,225 keywords see Reddit outranking every vendor simultaneously, covering 957,540 monthly searches where buyers encounter Reddit before they encounter any brand.
But the data tells a more nuanced story than “Reddit wins everything.” And the nuance is where the action is.
Why it matters
1. It’s not a ‘reviews’ story. Reddit owns commercial intent.
The common explanation is that Reddit dominates because people search for reviews and alternatives. That accounts for about a third of Reddit’s wins. The other two-thirds come from generic category terms — “email marketing software,” “CRM for small business,” “sales automation tools.” No “best” or “vs” modifier. Just someone searching for a product category, and Google deciding a subreddit is more relevant than the vendor’s own website.
77% of the search volume Reddit wins comes from keywords that have nothing to do with reviews, alternatives, or comparisons. These are the pipeline keywords.
2. The more expensive the keyword, the worse it gets.
This was the finding that surprised us most. We expected Reddit’s dominance to be concentrated in low-competition keywords where vendors aren’t trying to rank. The opposite is true.
At $50+ CPC, Reddit beats all competitors 67.3% of the time. The keywords you’re spending the most on in paid are the exact keywords where Reddit sits above you in organic. You’re paying a premium on ads while a free Reddit thread captures the organic click.
3. But one vertical actually fights back — and wins.
UCaaS vendors (RingCentral, Nextiva, Dialpad) scored a Reddit Threat Index of just 22 out of 100, while Sales Tech hit 93 out of 100. Same algorithm. Same Reddit communities. Same era.
The difference isn’t domain authority or brand size. It’s content strategy.
UCaaS vendors built glossaries, comparison guides, “how to choose” articles, and category explainers — education-first content targeting the KD 21–60 difficulty range that every other vertical leaves wide open. Nextiva averages position 15.9 on informational keywords. Salesloft averages 55.6. That 40-position gap is the difference between a content strategy that serves the buyer’s full journey and one that only shows up at the bottom of the funnel.
The brands losing to Reddit didn’t get outgunned. They got out-invested on content.
| Vertical | Beats All | Traffic Share | KV Share | Threat Index |
| Sales Tech | 66.5% | 66.7% | 65.2% | 93/100 |
| Review Sites | 50.3% | 46.7% | 64.0% | 72/100 |
| SaaS Platforms | 53.3% | 35.3% | 23.4% | 58/100 |
| UCaaS/CCaaS | 17.3% | 15.1% | 15.1% | 22/100 |
What to do about it
Identify the 3–5 subreddits that are outranking you. Just five subreddits drive 3,709 keyword appearances and over 1.1M in combined monthly search volume across B2B SaaS. Your category has its own version of this. Run a keyword gap analysis between your domain and Reddit, extract the subreddits from the ranking URLs, and you’ll find the specific communities eating your organic real estate.
Build education-first content at KD 21–60. This is Reddit’s sweet spot in every vertical except the one where vendors actually invested. Stop chasing ultra-hard vanity keywords or easy low-volume terms. Target the medium-to-hard difficulty range with glossaries, “what is” explainers, and “how to choose” frameworks. This is the most commercially valuable difficulty tier — and the one most SaaS companies ignore.
Show up on Reddit. For real. The subreddits ranking for your keywords are full of real people asking real questions about your category. A thoughtful comment in r/CRM or r/sales places your expertise inside the organic result that’s already outranking your website. Not pitching — contributing. Identify the people at your company with genuine category expertise and build a presence the way you’d build thought leadership on LinkedIn.
Run a Reddit keyword gap audit quarterly. A one-time analysis tells you where you stand today. A quarterly audit tells you whether the gap is widening or closing. Build this into your regular reporting cadence — Reddit’s position in your SERP is now as important as domain authority or organic traffic trends.
🎧 New Podcast Episode
SEO Is Not What You Think Anymore (Ross And Mike King Explain Why)
On the latest episode of the Ross Simmonds Show, Ross sits down with Mike King, founder of iPullRank, to unpack what separates old-school SEO from the AI search era — and why calling it “just SEO” is quietly costing teams budget and influence. They get into:
- How AI search actually works (RAG, query fan-out, passage relevance)
- Why YouTube is one of the highest-leverage plays for AI citations
- How to measure performance in a way that actually tells you what’s happening
If this week’s Reddit data made you rethink your content strategy, this conversation takes it further. Listen now for free on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Go Deeper on: Reddit’s SERP Dominance
→ Your B2B Buyers Are Building Shortlists on Reddit. Are You Even in the Conversation? — Reddit holds 8,300+ top-3 SERP positions for “best software” keywords, gets cited millions of times by AI platforms, and now feeds directly into G2 through an official partnership. This piece covers why paid-first is the fastest entry point. [Foundation Labs]
→ Brands Are Losing Control of the BoFu Journey: Here’s How to Take It Back — Reddit ranks for 27.9M commercial-intent keywords and generates nearly 200M organic visits for bottom-of-funnel queries. Ross’s Lurk, Listen, Leap framework applied to the BoFu conversations happening without you. [Foundation Labs]
→ Reddit Keyword Research: 4 Methods to Find Keywords Your Competitors Miss — Ryan Law at Ahrefs walks through how to use Site Explorer on subreddits the same way you’d analyze a competitor domain. Practical methodology for the keyword gap audit we recommend in this issue. [Ahrefs]
That’s it for this week.
If something landed, tell us. If something felt off, tell us that too. Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.
Have a great weekend,
Ethan Crump
