Reddit has long been a breeding ground of internet culture, but if you’ve used any kind of AI search recently, you know that it shows up in a lot of results. (Like, all of ’em.)
This week’s master is a marketer at Reddit, and she’s full of tips to build your brand presence — without piquing the ire of angry Redditors who deeply hate your ads and aren't afraid to tell you all about it.
Meet the Master
Grace Close
Principal product marketing manager, Reddit
Lesson 1: Direct customer relationships are crucial.
It’s no secret that traditional SEO isn’t sending much traffic to your website these days.
Close says, “If you think about the implications that has for marketers, you have to figure out new channels to develop those direct connections. Reddit is a place to do that.”
She gives an example of a small business called Austin Tree Amigos, which provides — you guessed it — arborist services in Austin, Texas. Close says that the owner shows up in Austin subreddits, “giving advice to people on how to take care of certain species of trees native to Austin, [or] how to prepare for winter.”
Close explains that “the reason why that's such a really great post for a business on Reddit is that he wasn't trying to sell his services. He wasn't coming in and broadcasting himself. He had been a member of that community for several years.”
And that brings us to…
Lesson 2: Never argue with customer experience.
“If you're on Reddit trying to control the narrative by refuting the lived experience of your customers [in the comments], that can go wrong really quickly,” Close emphasizes.
You might need thick skin for this — “if people are giving [your business] feedback on Reddit — if people are talking about you and you’re perceived as negative — stop and consider why you’re getting that feedback,” Close says.
This is not the time for leadership to drop in and tell customers why they’re wrong. Go back to Lesson 1 and take some time to listen before you start responding.
As HubSpot’s senior director of digital marketing, Aja Frost, said in a recent Field Notes interview, “Reddit is so allergic to inauthentic promotion, you have to engage really thoughtfully.”
Frost added, “We‘ve seen that when engagement or participation on HubSpot’s subreddit goes up, then positive mentions of HubSpot go up across Reddit. And so we've actually really focused on making the HubSpot subreddit a really great place to hang out because we see ripple effects across the ecosystem.”
Lesson 3: AI systems need both structured data and human experience.
I’ve long been a fan of using Reddit and PubMed to find any kind of medical information — if I’m searching for new migraine treatments, I’ll be able to find firsthand accounts as well as studies that back them up. (And somewhere between one and 100 folks willing to call out the BS.)
Turns out, LLMs work kinda the same way. “These new search experiences need to pair informational structured data with human experience data in order to answer people's questions,” Close says.
It used to be that I’d just Google “new migraine treatments,” but now I can give an AI search engine a lot more information about what’s worked and what hasn’t, and I’ll get far more personalized results that I can turn into questions for my doctor.
"In order for the LLM to [respond] to that very personal question, it needs to be able to pull from humans that have been in the same scenario, as well as from all of the structured information you can get elsewhere on the internet."
What does that mean for your brand? Ultimately, it comes back to a great product or great experience — if your customers are happy (and active Redditors), and if you’re structuring your web content for AEO, you’re a lot more likely to show up in LLM search results.
Lingering Questions
This Week’s Question
Reddit is where authentic expertise and lived experience surface before they ever show up in polished content. As search and AI systems increasingly rely on community signals, how should brands participate in Reddit without collapsing trust, and what does “earning relevance” look like in a system that actively resists marketing theater?
—Michael King, CEO and founder, iPullRank
This Week’s Answer
Close: You have to first come to Reddit and observe or listen to the community you want to participate in, because how you show up really depends on who you are as a brand.
We like to use this analogy of Reddit being a party or a cocktail party — when you walk into a party, there are groups of people all having their own conversations about different things. And when you walk into that party on other platforms, you're walking in and everyone is sort of facing towards the middle and shouting at each other.
But what you‘re doing here as a user of Reddit — as a business who is a user of Reddit — is that you’re finding the group of people who you want to participate in conversation with. And the first thing you do is actually listen to what they‘re saying. You’re [thinking,] what is something helpful that I could add to this conversation? Maybe you interject here or there to add your perspective before ever redirecting the conversation."
Next Week’s Lingering Question
Close asks: As B2B audiences get more skeptical of polished brand content, how do you see the role of social and content evolving? What should marketers be doing now to stay ahead of that shift?
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Actionable Approaches
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