Take one post off next month’s calendar and spend its hours on the Reddit thread your buyers read when they ask your category’s question. Where that thread exists, get your product honestly named in it. Where it does not, start it, titled the way they type the question.
A thread like that does more for you on Google and in AI answers than a quarter’s worth of average posts, and it costs less than one of them. It borrows Reddit’s authority to rank first or second for a buying query your domain will not win. The AI answer above it repeats the brands the thread names, and the thread keeps doing both for years.
That holds where buyers ask each other for software recommendations in public. If nobody asks about yours on Reddit, none of this is for you. You should also know who is telling you this. Empact Partners is a go-to-market consultancy, and this Reddit work is part of the Generative Engine Optimization it sells.
The Thread Takes The Page Your Post Was Written For
On October 2 we pulled Google’s U.S. first page for twelve software buying searches, running from “best crm for startups” to “jira alternatives.” A Reddit thread held a place on page one in all twelve and the first organic result in nine. Then we counted the vendors’ own posts on the same pages.
Posts from software companies’ own blogs took 41 page-one places across those searches, each the best its company had published on the question. Three of the 41 ranked above the thread.
The other 38 were the winners of their own content programs, and each still sat beneath a forum post nobody at its company could edit. The average post never reaches that first page at all. It is an ordinary page, and Ahrefs found that 96.55% of pages in its index get no traffic from Google.
A thread does not need years to get there, either. The first result for “salesforce alternatives” on October 2 was a thread posted two weeks earlier, above five vendor blog posts and Gartner’s review page.
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We are not the only ones counting. Ross Simmonds and his team at Foundation studied 8,566 B2B software keywords. In three of their four verticals, Reddit outranked every vendor at once on between half and two-thirds of the shared keywords. Rand Fishkin’s post about it drew 558 reactions and 115 comments.
The one vertical where the pattern broke is the useful part. Where vendors invest in informational content, Reddit beat every vendor on only 17.3% of keywords, so a great blog can hold its ground against a thread and an average one cannot.
The Threads That Failed Were Written For Views
We learned what makes a thread good enough for that place on a partner’s budget. Our first Reddit program for an insurance brokerage was five informative posts in large subreddits, titled for Reddit’s own audience. It drew nearly 100,000 views and no leads, and the partner’s CEO saw no visibility in any of it.
The rebuild kept the channel and changed the thread. Every post became a recommendation request in a small community where the brokerage’s buyers ask for help, titled the way they search. Six weeks later its threads were on Google’s first page, and that month they brought 20+ qualified leads in its first ten days and about 40 by its end.
KKday shows the same pattern at a larger scale. A three-month program of about twenty new threads a month, built from questions American travelers were already asking, drew 3,208,973 views and 4,250 upvotes. Those are reach figures, and we read them only as reach: how far a thread titled as a real question travels.
Titling for the search is where our Reddit work for a partner starts. Before anything is posted, our Reddit marketers list the buying questions in the category, search each one, and sort what comes back:
A partnership opens with an audit and a roadmap under a named senior consultant who is on your calls, and this sort is the first thing our Reddit marketers do in it. You bring the questions your sales team hears. The steps after the sort are the part of the work we do not publish, and the horizon is quarters, because threads pay in lumps.
The Engine Puts The Thread In The Answer
Ranking also feeds the answer. On October 19 we put the same twelve questions to Google’s AI Mode, signed out, from the U.S., two months after ChatGPT cut back its own Reddit citations. Eleven of the twelve answers cited sources, and a Reddit thread was among them in ten of the eleven.
In four of those, it was the same thread that had held a page-one place on October 2. This is the answer to “asana vs monday,” and the first source it cites.
That first chip, on Asana’s own description, is a thread from r/projectmanagement posted in October 2023, the first Google result in our October 2 pull. Neither vendor wrote it or can edit it, and three years on it is the first source the engine cites when a buyer asks.
Vendor blog posts were cited in ten of the eleven answers too, and their web addresses explain why. Fourteen were cited, each from a different company, and 13 of the 14 carry the search’s own words in their URL, like “best-crm-for-startups.” The engine cites the page titled as the question, which is the rule the brokerage’s rebuild ran on.
Ten Speed, which calls Reddit a red herring for B2B marketers, counted community sources at only 4.2% of citations on evaluation-stage questions. Yet it found that “when a Reddit thread surfaces, AI tends to lean on it heavily.” In its count few threads get in, and the ones that do carry more citation weight than other sources.
Being inside that thread is what moves share of voice, the share of answers to your category’s questions that name you. Qvery, our sister company, measures it every day, so these are our own numbers and worth weighing that way. Check the ones we published rather than take this paragraph’s word for them.
Across sixteen software companies’ tracked questions from June to August, mostly before ChatGPT’s change, reddit.com appeared in 22.8% of ChatGPT’s answers and in 27.9% of AI Mode’s. That beat the companies’ own sites on ChatGPT and matched them on AI Mode. In a typical category, ten threads carried almost a third of all the Reddit citations.
Threads like that are the user half of Generative Engine Optimization as Empact Partners defines it. We write it as GEO = UGC + Mentions: user-generated content, meaning the public conversation real users have about a brand, plus the independent pages that name it. It has been one of our six workstreams since 2020.
A Thread Costs Less Than One Post And Keeps Working For Years
The cost of a post is plain arithmetic. Orbit Media’s 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers puts the writing of an average post at three hours and twenty minutes. At two posts a week, a quarter is 26 posts and about 87 hours of writing before anyone edits them, designs them, or links to them.
Nobody times a thread that way, us included, because the writing was never its cost. Starting one takes a title in your buyer’s words and a few honest sentences, and the answers come from people who used the products. Being named in one that already ranks takes less, and Ethan Smith of Graphite told Lenny’s Podcast how little.
From about sixteen minutes in, Smith’s advice is to answer under your own name and employer in a thread that is already part of an engine’s citations, and he thinks five good comments can be enough. The expensive part is knowing which thread to join, and which question to put in a new one’s title.
Put the two side by side and the cost turns out to be the smallest difference between them:
| The average post | One good thread | |
|---|---|---|
| What it takes to make | Three hours and twenty minutes of writing, then editing, design, and links | A title in the buyer’s words and a short paragraph, or a few honest comments in a thread that already ranks |
| Where it ranks | Usually nowhere on page one | First on nine of our twelve software buying searches |
| Whether an engine cites it | Only when titled as the question and already ranking | Among the sources in ten of eleven AI Mode answers |
| How long it works | Until the next post buries it | First-place threads aged between two weeks and four and a half years |
| Who controls it | You, entirely | The community, its moderators, and the engines |
How long it works is the line a content calendar never budgets for. The first-place thread for “jira alternatives” on October 2 was posted in March 2022, and it still sat above every vendor page for one of the most fought-over queries in software.
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The post wins one row of that table, the one for control, and that row is the whole case against the thread.
“Reddit Is Rented Land, And ChatGPT Just Proved It”
The objection comes from the CMO who has watched a channel disappear before, and every part of it is true:
Concede all five and the decision stays where it was, because the post you own for that question is already beneath the thread. That is where 38 of the 41 vendor posts sat across our twelve first pages. A post you own in fourth place is a page your buyer scrolls past.
Seven weeks after the August drop, a Reddit thread was still the first organic result on nine of our twelve searches, and on October 19 a thread was among the sources in ten of eleven AI Mode answers. Ahrefs’ September reading had reddit.com as the most-cited site in Google AI Mode.
ChatGPT has swung like this before. A year earlier, the share of ChatGPT’s responses citing Reddit fell from about 60% to about 10% in six weeks, by Semrush’s count. By this July, Reddit was again one of the largest sources ChatGPT cited.
Where the product page wins
Ten Speed’s study is the fair limit on all of this. Once a buyer’s question carries a vendor’s name, product and comparison pages take most of the citations, and that is what those pages are for. Even so, each of our three “X vs Y” answers in AI Mode cited a thread.
Moderators are right about brands. A brand account posting about itself is what gets removed, because the regulars can tell a pitch from an answer. The thread that survives them is a buyer’s question with users’ answers, and the brand inside it is named by people who used it.
Take One Post Off Next Month’s Calendar
Take the buying question your sales team hears most, search it signed out, and look at the first two results. If a thread is there, it is the most valuable page in your category this month, and next month’s post is the one to give up for it.
If no thread is there, the question is open, and it stays open until a competitor puts up a thread titled as that question.
If your buyers are already asking that question on Reddit and your brand is missing from the answer, book a call with us, and we’ll decide together whether we should take it on.
