Yes, if buyers in your category discuss vendors on Reddit at all, part of your next content hire’s week belongs there. That is the easy half of the answer.
The hard half is that the question, in the form it usually reaches a leadership meeting, cannot be answered. Reddit against the blog is a channel question, and nobody buys a channel. Next week you decide whether one person spends their weeks publishing on a domain you own or being useful on one you never will, and that turns on conditions that have nothing to do with which channel is better in the abstract.
A Thread Is a Page You Cannot Own
Strip away the word Reddit and a thread is a familiar object. Its title is a question a buyer types, its body answers that question, and it sits on a domain that ranks better than yours. Judged as an asset, the only difference between a good thread and a good page on your blog is the deed.
Before Empact Partners existed I left one answer in a small community, for a product I was working on. I wrote it once and never touched it again, and for about four years it stayed near the top of that niche and sent a steady trickle of signups. There was no campaign behind it and nothing to maintain.
Our sister company Qvery captures how ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answer software buying questions, every day. We counted three months of them, June to August: reddit.com turned up in 22.8% of the ChatGPT answers and 27.9% of the Google AI Mode answers. The company’s own website turned up in 17% and 27.6% of those same answers.
The two are not the same kind of thing, and the comparison only means something once you say so. One reddit.com carries every thread by every person about every vendor in a category. Your domain carries you. On Google AI Mode they come out level, which means the site nobody in your market owns is turning up in your buyers’ answers as often as the site your whole content budget pays for.
How much of that is reachable is the question a budget holder should ask next. In the categories we cut, reddit.com’s share ran from roughly one answer in six to two in five, so this is not a rule about software, it is a fact about your own category that you can go and check. The concentration is what makes it workable. A typical category spread its Reddit citations across hundreds of separate threads, and the ten most-cited carried about a third of them. The top twenty-five carried close to half.
Nobody can own reddit.com. Half of its pull in a category sits on twenty-five threads a team can read in an afternoon, and that arithmetic is why Empact Partners runs Generative Engine Optimization as a workstream, the work of becoming the brand an engine names when a buyer asks the category question: we map the pages and threads an engine already quotes in a partner’s category, then work to get the partner named in them. We define that work as UGC plus mentions, what real users say about you in public plus what third-party pages say about you, because the two together decide whether an engine names you at all.
Your Own Pages Fall Out of the Answers Faster
The compounding argument gets made a lot and measured almost never. So we took every page an engine cited in these categories in the spring and followed each one to the end of August.
Most of them stopped being cited quickly, whichever side they were on. Six in ten of both kinds appeared in one month and never again, which is worth saying out loud before anyone plans a quarter around a single thread.
The survivors are where the two part company.
| Pages first cited in March, followed to August | Reddit threads | The companies’ own pages |
|---|---|---|
| Still cited five months later | 10.5% | 7.9% |
| Cited in every one of the six months | 5.7% | 5.8% |
| Pages first cited between March and May | Reddit threads | The companies’ own pages |
|---|---|---|
| Stopped being cited and had not come back by the end of August | 70.1% | 88.6% |
| Of those cited in two months or more, went quiet for a month and returned | 17.4% | 10.1% |
A thread that survives its first month is more likely to still be working five months later than a post on your own site is. That is the row to take into the meeting. The row to budget for is the last one, because threads go quiet and come back at nearly twice the rate your own pages do, and we have watched one partner’s thread lose almost all its traffic and then recover weeks later with nothing changed on it.
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Nothing about that pattern is comfortable to report upward. A blog’s traffic grows in a shape leadership has learned to read, slowly and unevenly but visibly. Reddit pays in lumps, and if the first quiet month arrives before anyone was warned, the work gets killed in week six by a team acting reasonably on the information it had. Say that in the meeting where you ask for the allocation.
It Only Pays When Somebody Owns It
The version that fails is easy to describe, because most companies try it first. Someone with a full calendar is asked to spend their spare hours being visible. They post something informative in the biggest subreddit they can find, watch the view count, and report the view count. Six weeks later there are views and no conversations with buyers, and the CEO who never liked the idea is holding a number that proves the point.
The version that works has a name on it and a goal per unit of work. Four things separate it from the afternoon version, and each one is something our Reddit marketers settle before they write anything:
Before you hire anyone, confirm there is something to compound. Search a handful of your real buying questions and see whether your category is being discussed at all. An afternoon of that tells you whether the answer is yes.
An afternoon cannot tell you which of those threads carry the citations, which communities convert, or which ones are worth a quarter of somebody’s time. That is the audit, and it is the first thing a partnership with us produces, ahead of the roadmap and instead of a content calendar. A named senior GTM consultant owns it and is on your calls, specialists join per workstream, and two or three workstreams run at once because they feed each other. The reporting is ours and it ships on a schedule, each recommendation carrying its first step. The horizon is quarters, and plenty of our partnerships run five years and longer, because these engines are worth more in year three than in year one.
We will not tell you that Reddit deserves fifteen percent of your content budget, because nobody can support that number, us included. We can give you the shape of the commitment instead, and its top end is public: our three-month Reddit campaign for KKday ran about twenty new threads a month, and those threads drew 3.2 million views and 4,250 upvotes, with the strongest still ranking in Google for the questions their buyers ask. That took a team and daily attention, which is what the case study says and what the work costs at that size. One person, present weekly, with a goal per thread and a quarter to show something, is the smallest version that behaves like a program at all.
We measure the result with Qvery, which is our own sister company, so discount that measurement as much as you like and ask to see the citations underneath it. We built it because this work needed a number nobody was producing.
Five Questions to Answer Before the Meeting
Run these in order. The first no you hit is your answer, and only the last one has a fix that does not mean waiting.
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Do buyers discuss vendors in your category on Reddit today? Search your real buying questions and read what comes back. No discussion means nothing to compound, and the answer is no for now rather than no forever.
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Can your team hold its nerve through a quiet month? If four flat weeks will be read as failure by anyone with authority over the budget, the lumps will end the work before the pattern shows.
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Is there a goal for each planned thread, or only presence? Presence produces the afternoon version, and views that persuade nobody.
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Is attribution agreed before the first post? Asking new leads how they found you counts. Without something like it, the work that is landing deals looks unproven, and the budget goes to whatever reports cleanly.
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Is there a site worth sending a persuaded buyer to? A thread that recommends you sends someone to your website. If that site cannot answer what they came to ask, the thread is a well-written introduction to a dead end.
Five yes answers and the allocation is straightforward. Give one person the threads the distribution above points at and a quarter to work them, and keep the blog on whatever cadence one writer can sustain around that.
Fix the Site Before You Send Anyone to It
A no on the last question decides your sequence, and it is the sequence we put in front of partners whose website is not ready: fix the pages a buyer lands on, then go and earn the mentions that send them there. Doing it the other way round buys attention for a site that cannot convert it, which is an expensive way to find out what your homepage says.
A yes leaves you with a narrower decision than the one you started with. Not which channel deserves the budget, but whether the person you are about to hire owns one surface or two, and whether anyone has told your CEO that the second one pays in lumps.
Book twenty minutes and bring the buying questions your prospects type, and I will tell you which threads own those answers in your category today, and whether there are twenty-five worth anyone’s quarter.
