In this week’s episode of Voices of Search, we spoke with Danny Kirk, founder of ReddiReach, about how Reddit has become the AI training ground for discovery and why enterprise brands need to stop viewing it as a reputation risk. With Google paying $60 million annually to license Reddit data and Sam Altman holding a 9% stake in Reddit stock, the platform’s influence on AI search results is undeniable. 

Danny’s agency has helped over 500 brands navigate Reddit ethically and at scale, turning what most marketers see as dangerous territory into a powerful discovery advantage. He revealed why Reddit’s upvote system creates more reliable brand sentiment than traditional advertising, and how smart brands are building AI visibility through authentic community engagement.

Key Takeaways From this Episode:

• Reddit maintains 20% of AI citations despite dropping from 80%, which represents massive influence for a single source and reflects healthier data diversity rather than declining importance.
• The upvote and downvote system creates a law of the crowd that rewards authentic, helpful content while punishing bad actors, making Reddit sentiment more reliable than paid advertising.
• Brands should focus on genuinely solving user problems first and mentioning their brand second, letting positive sentiment snowball over time as AI continuously scrapes this information.
• Never engage with trolls or negative posts on Reddit because it only amplifies the problem, and instead, focus on creating helpful interactions in neutral territory.
• This is a forever strategy similar to SEO 25 years ago, requiring long-term commitment, where brands that start now will have compounding advantages as barriers to entry increase.

The Financial Incentives Driving Reddit’s AI Dominance

Reddit has been famously unprofitable for its entire existence until the AI boom changed everything. The platform’s licensing deals with major AI companies represent the first truly sustainable business model Reddit has found. Google’s $60 million annual investment, OpenAI’s API partnership, and Sam Altman’s significant stock position all point to one reality: Reddit has become essential infrastructure for AI discovery.

“Reddit has been famously unprofitable for its entire existence. Thank goodness for LLM scraping their data because they might not have been around today,” Danny explained. “This is finally a business model that is working for them.”

But why are AI companies willing to pay so much for Reddit data? The answer lies in what they’re actually buying: authentic human conversation about real products and services. Unlike brand websites (too biased) or traditional media (too polished), Reddit captures unfiltered consumer opinions as they evolve in real-time.

“New products come onto the market all the time, new categories of products,” Danny noted. “If somebody types in, ‘What are the best midsize trucks for 2026?’ What if they didn’t have any data on what people think about the best midsize trucks for 2026? Where else would they get that data? You can’t get it directly from the website. That’s too biased.”

This creates a virtuous cycle: AI companies need current human data, Reddit users provide it through organic discussion, and the platform sells access to that data while maintaining quality through its community voting system. Reddit isn’t just another data source—it’s become the temperature gauge for how consumer perception shifts in real-time.

The Power of the Crowd: Why Reddit’s Voting System Works

Most enterprise marketing teams view Reddit as a reputation minefield where one angry customer can torpedo brand sentiment. Danny argues the opposite is true, and it comes down to Reddit’s fundamental mechanism: upvotes and downvotes.

“I think one of the greatest features of Reddit is the upvote and the downvote. It is the law of the crowd,” Danny said. “Just like when you go to the state fair, and everyone gets to guess the bull’s weight, some one person says one pound and somebody says a million pounds, but you average it all out, and it’s actually right on the money. I think that’s how Reddit works as well.”

This crowd-sourced validation system creates natural quality control that paid advertising can never achieve. When a brand representative or enthusiastic customer posts helpful content, the community votes it up if it genuinely adds value. When bad actors try to manipulate discussions or post misleading information, the community downvotes them into oblivion.

The result is more reliable than any focus group or survey because it reflects actual consumer behavior at scale. AI companies recognize this, which is why they’re willing to pay premium prices for Reddit data. They’re not just buying text—they’re buying community-validated truth about products, services, and brands.

“Reddit enforces good actors winning,” Danny emphasized. “The people that go in and focus on incredible content creation, genuine interactions—that stuff gets upvoted. It gets scraped by AI.”

The ReddiReach Approach: Help First, Brand Second

After working with over 500 brands on Reddit, Danny’s agency has developed a clear methodology that works consistently: prioritize helping the reader over promoting the brand.

“Our number one goal is to help the reader. It’s not to mention our client’s brand, even,” Danny explained. “We go in there with genuine, helpful, factually accurate, and truthful comments that try to help the reader and then mention our client’s brand as part of that. And then we just let that snowball over time.”

This approach requires patience and a fundamental shift in how marketing teams think about content. Instead of crafting promotional messages designed to drive immediate conversions, ReddiReach creates comments that solve specific user problems. The brand mention comes naturally as part of the solution, not as the primary objective.

The strategy works because it aligns perfectly with what both Redditors and AI engines want: authentic, helpful information. Community members upvote genuinely useful content, which signals to AI scrapers that this information is trustworthy. Over time, these positive interactions accumulate, building a foundation of favorable brand sentiment that gets incorporated into AI training data.

“You’re not going in there doing a bunch all at once. You’re trickling it out. It’s very similar to SEO. It’s a long-tailed approach, and then you’re just snowballing over time, and it just builds and builds and builds,” Danny said. “That reputation increases, and then AI is continually scraping that information as well.”

Who Should (And Shouldn’t) Use Reddit

Not every brand is equally suited for Reddit marketing. Danny outlined clear criteria for which companies will see the best returns from Reddit investment.

The ideal Reddit brand has:

• Large total addressable market (TAM): Not geographically constrained to a single city or region
• Strong niche positioning: Products or services that solve specific problems for defined communities
• Three to five highly relevant subreddits: Active communities where target customers already discuss related topics
• E-commerce or software offerings: Categories where AI-powered discovery has immediate purchase implications

“The ones that are truly kind of fish in the barrel are not geo-specific ones. A large TAM otherwise. So like, maybe a mattress company or something like that, or a software company. Most e-commerce brands fall into this,” Danny explained.

On the flip side, brands that struggle on Reddit include:

• Local brick-and-mortar businesses: A mom-and-pop store in a small town lacks sufficient Reddit surface area
• Highly specialized B2B services: Where the target audience is too small to have active Reddit communities
• Region-specific offerings: Products or services that only work in limited geographic areas

The protein bar example Danny shared illustrates the perfect Reddit opportunity. His client was a seven-figure brand competing against a nine-figure behemoth that had just sold another company for ten figures. Despite the resource disadvantage, the smaller brand could compete effectively on Reddit by targeting specific niches.

“It’s not just like what’s the best protein bar, it’s what’s the best protein bar for these two issues or for the X, Y, and Z,” Danny said. “Really kind of dialing in on that in an incredibly organic way and then getting picked up by AI search as well.”

Handling Negative Sentiment: The Golden Rule

One of the most common questions Danny gets is how to handle negative Reddit posts about a brand. His answer surprises many marketers: don’t engage at all.

“We have a rule at our company, and most Redditors follow this as well. You never feed a troll on Reddit,” Danny said firmly. “We actually just do not engage with any super negative post or anything like that on Reddit. There is only downside in that.”

This approach feels counterintuitive to brands trained to monitor and respond to every mention. But Reddit’s community dynamics make engagement with negative posts a losing strategy. Jumping into a critical thread to defend your brand typically backfires, bringing more attention to the complaint and inviting pile-on from other users.

“If you think it was bad before, going in there and trying to be like, ‘Hey, we’re not actually bad.’ Nope. All those people that were hating on you before will come attack you on that comment,” Danny warned.

Instead, the ReddiReach strategy focuses on building positive sentiment in neutral territory. By consistently showing up in discussions where people ask genuine questions or seek advice, brands can accumulate a large body of helpful, upvoted content that drowns out occasional negative posts.

“It’s really trying your best, and I know it’s hard to ignore that one or a small handful of negative interactions on there, and just really focus on adding value and being helpful in ones that are virgin territory,” Danny advised. “People asking for a solution that you solve for or like a comparison of a product, just being really helpful and beneficial in those areas, and just do your best to ignore those other ones.”

This approach recognizes a critical truth: AI engines training on Reddit data look at aggregate sentiment, not individual posts. One angry customer’s rant matters far less than dozens of helpful interactions where your brand gets mentioned positively as part of genuine solutions.

The Branded Account Strategy: Be the Guardian Angel

For brands maintaining official Reddit accounts, Danny advocates a specific approach: act as the helpful customer service representative, not the salesperson.

“I really love the approach of just being like a branded customer service representative,” Danny said. “Just being out there and being helpful. Like, if you see somebody that had a question about your shoe company, going in there and being like, ‘Hey, here’s the FAQ to our website.’ If you have any questions, shoot me a DM. Just being like the happy helper on there, the guardian angel of your brand.”

This strategy works because it provides value without being pushy. When users see a branded account consistently answering questions, providing helpful resources, and solving problems without aggressive promotion, it builds goodwill. The community recognizes that the brand is participating in good faith, which earns upvotes and positive sentiment.

“Not being salesy, not being pushy, just answering questions and trying to be helpful,” Danny emphasized. “Imagine if people didn’t use your customer service line, and they just posted questions to Reddit. Act like that is your customer service line and then just go in there and be helpful to them.”

This approach also protects against the reputation risk that worries many enterprise teams. When an official brand account maintains a consistent presence, answering questions and helping users, it establishes credibility. If negative posts do appear, the community can see that the brand is engaged and responsive, which provides context that raw complaints lack.

Reddit vs. Other Platforms: Why Reddit Still Wins

Despite the massive audiences on platforms like Facebook, Twitter (X), Instagram, and TikTok, Reddit continues to dominate AI citations. Danny explained why this advantage will likely persist through 2026 and beyond.

“A lot would have to change for that to change. If we’re just saying 2026, a lot would have to change in a couple of months,” Danny noted when asked if other social channels would overtake Reddit.

The key differentiator is format. Reddit’s threaded discussion structure naturally creates the question-and-answer format that AI engines need. A typical Reddit thread starts with someone asking a question or seeking advice, followed by community members providing detailed answers, often with personal experience and specific product recommendations.

This structure is perfect for training AI models to understand user intent and provide helpful responses. In contrast:

• Facebook conversations are typically between friends and family, not public product discussions
• Twitter/X is too short-form and fragmented for detailed product comparisons
• Instagram is primarily visual, with minimal text for AI to parse
• TikTok requires video processing that’s more complex than text scraping

YouTube presents an interesting exception. While it doesn’t show up as prominently in AI citations currently, video content provides rich product demonstrations that text can’t match.

“YouTube is just such a powerful sentiment when you have an influencer or an expert talking about the product, and it just encapsulates so much more than what you could ever put into a Reddit thread,” Jordan noted during the discussion.

Danny agreed that YouTube is valuable, particularly for product categories where visual demonstration matters. However, for pure AI training data, Reddit’s text-based discussions remain more accessible and parseable.

“Consumer buying trends are changing. It used to be you go to Google, you type something in, you check the first three links, go to the website, read about it, and then you buy from there,” Danny explained. “Now it’s ask ChatGPT, and then you’re like, ‘Well, I should probably double check,’ so let me either go to Reddit because that’s my favorite source of humans or let me go to Instagram or YouTube because I have followed the influencers there.”

The Buy It Now Button: E-commerce’s Wake-Up Call

Three weeks before this conversation, ChatGPT released its “buy it now” functionality, and Danny sees it as a pivotal moment for e-commerce brands.

“If that doesn’t scare e-commerce companies into action, I don’t know what does,” Danny said. “Imagine this: your future customer is never going to your website. They’re not googling anymore. Your website doesn’t matter. Your ads don’t matter. All they did was type something into ChatGPT. It gave three recommendations based on the information it scraped, whether that’s good or bad information. And then there’s a buy it now button next to each of those three, and they just click buy.”

This represents a fundamental shift in how e-commerce works. Traditional strategies assume customers will visit your website, where you control the messaging, design, and conversion experience. But in an AI-first world, the entire decision happens inside the AI interface. Your brand gets mentioned (or doesn’t) based entirely on what information the AI has scraped and how that information portrays your products.

If Reddit discussions about your brand are positive, helpful, and detailed, the AI has rich context to recommend your products appropriately. If Reddit sentiment is negative or non-existent, you won’t even be in the consideration set.

“That is—we are in the early days of that, but it’s something that all e-commerce brands need to get a part of,” Danny warned.

This shift makes Reddit strategy existential for e-commerce companies. It’s no longer about driving incremental traffic or managing reputation—it’s about whether your brand appears in AI-powered shopping recommendations at all.

Reverse Engineering Your Reddit Presence

One of the most practical insights Danny shared is that brands can start understanding their Reddit presence immediately, without expensive tools or complicated analysis.

“You can go on and just reverse engineer all this,” Danny explained. “We’re going to talk about AI search intel tools in a bit, but you could just go on to Google, type in ‘best X for Y Reddit,’ and it’ll show you all the top Google-rated links.”

This simple exercise reveals what content Google (and by extension, AI engines) considers authoritative about your product category. By examining these top-ranking Reddit threads, brands can understand:

• What questions customers are actually asking
• How competitors are being discussed
• What product attributes matter most to real users
• Where sentiment gaps exist that your brand could fill

Danny also recommended using AI engines themselves to understand Reddit presence: “You can just ask, ‘Hey, what’s the best X for Y?’ And can you just cite Reddit links only? So then you can just essentially see all those links and see what people are kind of involved with, what types of discussions, how your brand, how those brands are mentioned in that and just kind of reverse engineer the process.”

For brands ready to invest more seriously, Danny’s team uses tools like Peekaboo to get deeper intelligence. These tools help identify:

• Top citations and how your brand performs relative to competitors
• Large leverage points where a single Reddit link is driving significant citations
• Search query types that are overweighted or represent opportunities to overtake competitors

“It’s really seeing like what are the top citations, how are they doing already relative to their peers, are there any large levers that we could pull, like maybe a single Reddit link is being cited and we should really just focus on that one,” Danny said about how his team uses these tools.

The 80% to 20% Drop: What It Really Means

Earlier in 2024, Reddit citations in ChatGPT responses reportedly reached 80-90% of all sources. Recent data shows that percentage has dropped to around 20%. Many marketers interpreted this as Reddit losing influence, but Danny sees it differently.

“Let’s just all acknowledge that that’s way too high. There should not be a single source that’s 90%,” Danny said. “I was actually talking to another very well-known founder yesterday. I was mountain biking with him, and he was saying honestly 20% seems too high for a single source.”

The drop from 80% to 20% reflects OpenAI’s effort to diversify data sources and reduce over-reliance on any single platform. It doesn’t mean Reddit has become less important—it means the AI companies are being more sophisticated about data sourcing.

“When you look at sources of any data, 20% is quite a bit,” Danny emphasized. “It did drop from 80% down to 20% on average, but 20% is still really large and probably even too large.”

This perspective is crucial for enterprise teams evaluating Reddit investment. A 20% share of AI citations represents enormous reach. No single marketing channel outside of Google itself can claim that level of influence on consumer discovery. The question isn’t whether Reddit matters—it’s whether your brand is part of that 20%.

The drop also reflects improving data quality. As Danny explained, Reddit’s human incentives align with what AI companies need: “What is Reddit selling? They’re selling human data. They don’t want bots. They don’t want trolls. They don’t want bad actors. They’re trying to give good human data because what do the big LLMs want? They want that human data, and they’re not going to pay 60 million a year if it’s bad data.”

Reddit as Wikipedia’s Successor

The conversation touched on an interesting historical parallel: Wikipedia’s role in powering Google’s knowledge graph. Wikipedia became the de facto source of truth for structured data, helping Google validate information and build rich results.

“As you think about Reddit, do you see that Reddit’s dominance is going to continue to stay as prevalent? And do you feel like there’s any history that might repeat itself between Reddit, Wikipedia, and how these are used as reference points on the internet?” Jordan asked.

Danny sees key differences that suggest Reddit’s dominance will persist: “Wikipedia is kind of a static thing. So Reddit is always changing and moving, and sentiment about brands, whereas Wikipedia is more like historical information. These are the facts, versus Reddit, which is like the voice of the crowd.”

This distinction matters enormously for AI applications. Wikipedia provides stable, factual information about what exists. Reddit provides dynamic, current information about what people think about what exists. Both are valuable, but for discovery and recommendation purposes—helping users decide what to buy or try—Reddit’s real-time consumer sentiment is more actionable.

“I imagine Reddit’s dominance stays relatively strong,” Danny predicted. “Then the other option is another platform that doesn’t yet exist comes out and gets 100 million users. That’s harder to do.”

Why “Weird” Is Reddit’s Superpower

When asked for one word to describe Reddit in the AI discovery world, Danny chose “weird.” But he meant it as high praise.

“I love weird, and I say that in a good term,” Danny clarified. “Unique people, people that are good people but that are authentic and have something truly interesting about them and are interested in others. There’s no better place to find those people than on Reddit.”

This weirdness—the platform’s embrace of niche communities, obscure interests, and authentic voices—is exactly what makes Reddit valuable for AI training. For any product category, no matter how specific, there’s likely a Reddit community discussing it in detail.

“For any obscure topic you can possibly think of, there are three subreddits about that topic. And I think that’s incredibly cool,” Danny said. “In a day and age where people are caught up in politics or tribal fights, people are just nerding out on the best shoe for a 100-mile race coming up, or some type of camper van, or cat videos.”

This niche specificity provides the detailed, context-rich discussions that AI engines need to understand nuanced user questions. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best running shoe for a 100-mile ultramarathon in wet conditions, the AI can find Reddit threads where ultrarunners discuss exactly that scenario.

The weirdness also creates authenticity that paid advertising can never replicate. People on Reddit aren’t performing for brands or influencer partnerships. They’re genuinely passionate about specific topics and willing to share detailed opinions. That authenticity is precisely what makes the data valuable for AI training.

The Day One Strategy: Taking the Pulse

When advising a global brand launching in the US market, Danny starts with intelligence gathering, not immediate posting.

“Let’s take the pulse in the room. Kind of see how they’re doing on Reddit in general. What’s the sentiment there? What’s the sentiment on AI search?” Danny outlined. “Are they showing up at all? Are they doing well or are they doing poorly?”

This diagnostic phase involves:

• Searching relevant subreddits for existing brand mentions
• Checking AI search results to see current brand positioning
• Identifying key competitors and how they’re discussed
• Understanding which product attributes drive positive sentiment
• Finding gaps where helpful content could make a difference

Only after understanding the current state does Danny recommend starting to post: “Let’s go in there and start kind of seeding things with incredibly helpful interactions like I mentioned at the very start that are genuine, helpful, factually accurate, and truthful.”

The strategy includes both community participation and branded account management: “Let’s get them with a branded account going to kind of building that flywheel of great sentiment, but also the helpful guardian angel of the brand that’s on there just chiming in when people have a product question.”

Most importantly, Danny emphasizes the long-term nature of Reddit strategy: “Let’s focus on the long game. This is a long-tail strategy. I think this is a forever strategy. I think this is SEO 25 years ago. I was one of those people that every day I complain that I didn’t get into SEO 25 years ago. Now I tell people today, it’s like this is that. It is the easiest it’ll ever be today, but it’s a forever strategy and let it snowball and compound over time and don’t stop.”

The Human Element in an AI World

One of the deeper themes in Danny’s perspective is the increasing value of authentic human interaction as AI becomes more prevalent.

“The more AI we use, the more bullish I am on being human and those people that are having a following,” Danny said. “Consumer buying trends are changing. Now it’s ask ChatGPT, and then you’re like, ‘Well, I should probably double check,’ so let me either go to Reddit because that’s my favorite source of humans.”

This creates an interesting paradox: AI is trained on human data, but as people rely more on AI, they also crave validation from real humans. Reddit serves both functions—it provides training data for AI while also being the place humans go to verify AI recommendations.

“Why do we think that AI search is going to win over Google? Nobody has a personal relationship with Google. We all know now that people are falling in love with AI—it has a voice, a literal voice. It’s talking to them. It’s coaching them,” Danny explained. “When it asks what’s the best luggage for X, Y, and Z trip, and it recommends that, they’re emotionally tied to that answer.”

But that emotional connection doesn’t eliminate the desire for human confirmation. If anything, it increases it. People want to know that the AI’s recommendation aligns with what other humans think, which drives them back to Reddit to verify.

This dynamic creates sustained value for Reddit presence even as AI tools become more sophisticated. Brands that build authentic Reddit communities now are investing in both AI training data and human touchpoints for verification.

The Consolidation Prediction

Danny made a counterintuitive prediction about Reddit’s future: as AI search grows, Reddit’s user base might actually consolidate rather than expand.

“I actually do think that the number of total Reddit users relative to their total usage—so like numbers of posts and comments—I actually think that’s going to go down over time. That’s going to consolidate because a lot of people are just going to be like, ‘All right, AI search, I just trust that,'” Danny said.

But he sees this as a positive development: “It’ll consolidate to people that are the true fans of Reddit, the super users, the ones that are the best actors on the platform, brands that are willing to play the long game on there. I actually think it’s a good thing that that may happen.”

This consolidation would improve data quality. If casual users migrate to AI search while passionate community members remain on Reddit, the platform becomes an even better source of expert opinion and detailed product knowledge. The signal-to-noise ratio improves, making the data more valuable for AI training.

For brands, this means early investment in Reddit presence becomes more important, not less. As the platform consolidates around super users and authentic contributors, new entrants will face higher barriers to building credibility. Brands that establish presence now, while the opportunity is more open, will have compounding advantages.

The Bottom Line

Reddit’s dominance in AI search isn’t an accident or a temporary phenomenon. It’s the result of fundamental alignment between what AI companies need (authentic human discussion about products and services) and what Reddit provides (community-validated opinions organized by topic).

The financial incentives are clear: Google is paying $60 million annually, Sam Altman holds 9% of Reddit stock, and OpenAI has established API partnerships. These companies aren’t making charitable investments—they’re securing access to irreplaceable training data.

For enterprise brands, the message is equally clear: Reddit is no longer optional for AI discovery strategy. The question isn’t whether to engage on Reddit, but how to do it ethically and effectively. As Danny’s work with 500+ brands demonstrates, success requires patience, authenticity, and commitment to helping users first and promoting brands second.

The opportunity window is open now. As Danny put it, channeling regrets about missing early SEO opportunities: “This is SEO 25 years ago. It is the easiest it’ll ever be today, but it’s a forever strategy. Let it snowball and compound over time and don’t stop.”

The brands that act now—building authentic community presence, creating genuinely helpful content, and letting positive sentiment accumulate—will establish positions that become exponentially harder to replicate as the space matures. 

Reddit isn’t a reputation risk. It’s the foundation of AI-powered discovery.

Voices of Search is a daily SEO and content marketing podcast hosted by Jordan Keone and Tyson Stockton. The show delivers actionable strategies and data-driven insights to help marketers navigate the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization and content marketing. New episodes air weekly, covering everything from technical SEO to AI discovery, featuring industry leaders and practitioners sharing real-world frameworks and proven tactics.

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