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Welcome to Volume 270 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 📚 Reddit Is Higher Ed’s Best Focus Group (And It’s Already Running)
- 📊 Google Search Console Now Tracks Social Channel Performance
- 👀 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.
📚 Reddit Is Higher Ed’s Best Focus Group (And It’s Already Running)
The enrollment cliff isn’t a forecast anymore — it’s here. High school graduates peak this year, then decline 13% by 2037.
But here’s what most institutions miss: the students who remain have fundamentally different priorities. They filter every decision through an ROI lens. And they’re making enrollment decisions in Reddit communities most marketing teams have never monitored.
Carnegie’s 2025 research found Reddit usage for graduate school research grew 167% since 2023.
Students are bypassing SEO content by adding “reddit” to their queries. And Google noticed — Reddit threads now rank in the top 3 for searches like “Is [University] worth it?”
Meanwhile, r/berkeley has 170,500 followers. r/WGU has 163,400. These communities shape brand perception, surface retention risks, and influence AI-generated answers about your institution.
Our latest deep dive breaks down how to turn Reddit into an intelligence engine:
- The meta communities where enrollment decisions start (r/ApplyingToCollege has 1M+ subscribers)
- Three real threads showing how students discuss cost, outcomes, and degree value
- The Lurk-Listen-Leap framework Foundation uses to help leading B2B Brands
- Why online programs are winning on community while traditional institutions lean on prestige
Read the complete guide on Foundation Labs to start listening where your students already are.
🎤 Ross is Speaking at Digital Cut 2026
Ross is taking the stage at Digital Cut 2026 — a three-day online conference bringing together the sharpest minds in AI, marketing, and digital innovation.
His session, “Unlocking Reddit: What the World’s Conversation Data Means for AI-Driven Innovation,” will explore how Reddit’s massive conversation dataset is shaping AI tools and what marketers need to understand about this shift.
He’s joining a lineup that includes Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Ali Abdaal, and Sophia Amoruso.
When: February 6-8, 2026
Where: 100% online (recordings included)
📊 Google Search Console Now Tracks Social Channel Performance
Google is expanding how it measures your brand’s visibility.
The company announced a new experiment in Search Console that integrates performance data from social channels — including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram — directly into the Insights report. The update gives site owners a unified view of how their content performs across Google Search, whether it lives on their website or their social profiles.
The new dashboard displays familiar metrics for each connected channel: total reach (clicks and impressions), top-performing content, trending search queries, and audience location data. Google will automatically identify social channels associated with your website and prompt you to add them.
For now, the rollout is limited. Only select sites will see the experiment, and channels must be auto-detected by Search Console rather than manually added.
This move signals Google’s recognition that brand discovery increasingly happens outside traditional websites. As users gravitate toward social platforms and short-form video, marketers need visibility into how that content surfaces in search results.
For teams already thinking about GEO and multi-platform distribution, this integration offers a clearer picture of where Google is actually sending traffic — and which social content is earning attention. It’s an early step, but it points toward a future where “search performance” means far more than website rankings alone.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
📈 Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11 billion acquisition deal | CNBC
📺 Ad revenues grew 8.8% in 2025 as analysts grapple with ‘the era of AI advertising’ | The Drum
❌ Google Disputes Report Claiming Ads Are Coming To Gemini In 2026 | Search Engine Journal
🏷️ Reddit is testing verification badges | TechCrunch
🚨 New Podcast Alert: All-in on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
In the latest episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross unpacks one of the most fundamental marketing shifts of our time — the rise of Generative Engine Optimization and why traditional SEO strategies are no longer enough.
Ross breaks down where AI discovery is actually happening, why being cited matters more than being clicked, and how to position your brand across the platforms that LLMs are pulling from — including some you might not expect.
Here’s what Ross covers:
- The shift from SEO to GEO: Why discovery no longer begins or ends on Google, and what it means to optimize for AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube.
- Where LLMs get their answers: AI tools are pulling from Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and user-generated content — not just webpages. Your content strategy needs to reflect that.
- YouTube as a GEO powerhouse: It’s the second-biggest search engine and a major citation source for LLMs. Ross explains why shallow clips are killing your discoverability and what actually works.
- The new listicle math: AI weighs citations based on list ranking. If you’re consistently sitting at #8 on “best software” roundups, you’re invisible to generative engines.
- Tailoring content for nuanced queries: LLMs recognize the difference between “best for beginners” and “best for enterprise.” Ross shares how to create persona-specific landing pages that actually get cited.
- The predictive future of discovery: Personalized AI results are coming. Google’s AI Overviews may soon use your Gmail, Calendar, and browsing history to shape responses — and the consumer journey might bypass websites entirely.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcast or Spotify to learn how to optimize for the AI-powered discovery era before your competitors figure it out.
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
Sometimes we get so bogged down by all the devices and algorithms that we forget people are much more complex. Strategist G Douglas recently wrote a great piece about how this plays out in media plans where buyers still treat channels like containers.
TV for emotion. Social for engagement. Search for intent. It’s tidy, but as Douglas argues, it no longer reflects how people actually experience media. And he brings decades (and in some cases, centuries) of neuroscientific research as the receipts.
Craik and Lockhart’s levels of processing theory — foundational research from the 1970s that still holds — shows that shallow processing (recognizing surface features) produces weaker memory traces than deep processing, which involves semantic elaboration and emotional integration. Someone scrolling past your ad is literally encoding it differently than someone leaning in to watch.
Then there’s Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, validated repeatedly since 1885: without reinforcement or deep encoding, most information decays within days. And neuroscience research shows that high-arousal, fast-cut environments may activate emotional response centers while bypassing the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for forming lasting memories.
We spend so much time optimizing for platforms built on precise, predictable logic that it’s easy to forget human attention is messier. People don’t move neatly from channel to channel. They shift between cognitive states — browsing, searching, passive drift, active exploration. Those states determine what sticks and what disappears.
The medium is the message, but it’s also the memory.
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
Marketers, what’s your most unpopular but true opinion?? In r/marketing
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
The Death of Channel Planning by G Douglas
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- The state of enterprise AI | OpenAI
- It’s a Bidding War: Paramount Attempts Hostile Offer for Warner Bros. | Hollywood Reporter
- Understanding the Reddit Mod: A Marketer’s Guide | Foundation Marketing
- How ChatGPT finds and Cites content across the Web | Chris Lever
💻 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 | GEO Partnerships Coordinator (PT)
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Account Manager
- Foundation Marketing | Reddit Specialist
- Foundation Marketing | Content Creator
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Account Coordinator
- 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
Charlie Brown Christmas – (1 Hour) Full Album
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!
