HOT TAKE: Reddit Will Have a Positive Influence on SEO

January 27, 2026

Updated: January 27, 2026

SUMMARY

Search to Sale founder Adrian Dahlin thinks Reddit's influence on SEO, AEO, & GEO is going to be good because Reddit is democratic and the wisdom of the crowd tends toward the truth.

How Reddit May Have a Positive Influence on SEO

I think Reddit’s influence on SEO & GEO (aka generative engine optimization or AI SEO) is going to be good because Reddit is democratic and the wisdom of the crowd tends toward the truth.

As you’ve probably heard, Reddit is the #1 cited website in AI answers from ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity (as of Oct 2025) .

Some people fearmonger about this because obviously anybody can post anything on Reddit and they can lie or be wrong or give bad advice.

But have you seen what happens on the internet when people say dumb things? The crowd lets them know! If a company claims they have great customer service and their customers disagree — they’ll say so!

If someone asks about the best software for [whatever], sure, fake booster accounts owned by software companies will drop in comments. But those comments won’t get the most upvotes and replies unless people actually like that tool.

What goes around comes around. I call it AUTHENTICITY KARMA. If you actually have a great company and your customers love you, the crowd will speak and that signal will rise to the top.

Honestly, though, this prediction will depend on a couple things:

The volume of AI content on Reddit can’t be too high (maybe over 30% is a problem?)
The sophistication of AI content can’t be so good it looks like human content in every way, even to Reddit itself

See a clip of me discussing this with John Hoeft and Danielle Schermerhorn on the LiftKit Marketing podcast.

What Does This Mean For You?

Reddit may be influencing your buyers’ decisions. You can test this out a couple ways:

Go to Reddit and do a keyword search. Pick a term that gets searched a lot in Google and is highly relevant to what you sell. Are lots of people discussing this on Reddit? Are they comparing options?
Search your brand name in Reddit. Are people talking about you? Positively or negatively?
Search Google and ChatGPT for a full sentence question that you can imagine your customer doing while researching solutions like yours (it probably contains one of your highest-opportunity keywords). Do Reddit threads appear in the answer?

If you see activity on Reddit related to your product/service category and you’re not there, you’re missing out on both A) the native value of visibility on Reddit and B) the secondary influence Reddit has on LLM training and answers.

We Offer Ethical Done-for-You Reddit Management

We can handle your entire Reddit content & engagement program. And we do it while honoring our core value of “Platform Integrity”. This means we use Reddit the way it’s intended. So we don’t post spam, we don’t lie, and we’re transparent when we’re being promotional (which is rare). Aka we’re trying not to enshittify the Internet. So you can feel good about your Reddit program.