Reddit: A Red Herring for B2B Marketers
Despite widespread belief that Reddit marketing is essential for AI visibility, the data tells a more nuanced story. For B2B marketers, chasing Reddit citations may be a costly distraction.
Howdy! 👋
We’re back after a busy few months to start the year. Over the last six months, we have explored whether Ten Speed should create a Reddit marketing service. That exploration led us to the answer (no) and to this broader perspective on what Reddit means for B2B marketers.
Let us know in the comments what you think or have experienced!
Cheers,
Nate
Search Visibility
A lot has changed for B2B marketers in the last 12 months. If you have reached a point where you need outside help to improve your search visibility (SEO + AEO) to drive more pipeline for your company, we’d love to chat. Learn more about Ten Speed.
Reddit: A Red Herring for B2B Marketers
Just under a year ago, in June 2025, Profound released a study analyzing 680 million citations to identify the most-cited sources. One of the key takeaways that SEO publications and marketers latched onto was the prevalence of Reddit: the top source for AI Overview citations & Perplexity and the #2 source for ChatGPT citations.
Later, in November 2025, Profound released another analysis that was commissioned by Reddit, stating that “Reddit is the single most cited domain, proving conversational content is a non-negotiable input for modern answer engines.”
From these two studies, analyzing a massive number of citations [read: not studies focused on B2B or commercial intent] came the widespread belief that marketers need to be “doing Reddit marketing” to show up in LLMs. In every conversation we have with marketers now, they either proudly tell us they are doing Reddit marketing or ask if we can do Reddit marketing for them.
So, it felt like a good time to explain why we believe Reddit marketing is a red herring for B2B marketers.
The Data Shows Otherwise
Instead of latching onto broad-stroke statements, it is important to drill down into a few different layers of data to understand what sources are driving citations and how brands can focus their AEO efforts to be most impactful.
Sources by Vertical
In the image below, you can see that different SaaS verticals had different patterns of citation sources, with healthcare and wellness citing established medical sources like PubMed and Mayo Clinic, and DevOps and security citing developer communities like GitHub. This shows the importance of understanding what is unique about your vertical, rather than a one-size-fits-all view of top citation sources.
The data in this chart comes from a study conducted by Foundation, Inc. and AirOps. They conclude from this data that Reddit is a top citation source to focus on (Foundation offers Reddit marketing services), even though it accounts for only about 7% of citations. The argument is that it is one of the few influential sources you can optimize, but it ignores that the long tail of 3rd-party sources is indirectly influenced by having a good brand, a good product, and overall, good marketing.
All of which we feel are more important and more sustainable than hacking your way into Reddit threads.
Sources by Competitive Set
Digging a layer deeper, you can analyze the top citation sources for your company and competitors across a large set of prompts. This is an important step that narrows the view from your vertical overall to the prompts and competitors you care about most.
In the image below, you can see the top sources for an edtech company we are tracking in Peec AI. Note that Reddit is not on the list, and YouTube is the only UGC site appearing among the top 8 domains cited.
This particular set is heavily dominated by institutional sources, so you can see how this makes a big difference in how you would go about optimizing for LLM visibility. Next, we will go even deeper into the top sources cited for one specific prompt.
Sources by Prompt
Understanding the top-cited sources for a specific prompt is the most revealing. In the image below, you can see how the domains change drastically for this specific prompt compared to the overall competitive set. It includes a broader range of types beyond institutional; YouTube is higher on the list, and Reddit is… absent.
Conversational content matters, but it's not always Reddit. In many B2B cases, the UGC sources are LinkedIn and YouTube. This, combined with the fact that these channels skew towards authenticity and brand-building, while Reddit is more anonymous and grey-hat, is why we offer LinkedIn ghostwriting and YouTube video creation services and not Reddit marketing services.
You can see how drilling down from the broad-stroke analysis of 680 million citations to verticals, to the competitive set, to specific prompts reveals markedly different lists of the most-cited domains.
What Reddit Marketing Services Entail
If you are considering hiring an agency to manage Reddit marketing for you, it is worth digging in to better understand what those services entail and the tactics being used.
Most have offshore teams that are spinning up Reddit accounts in different verticals and karma-farming with fake engagement on industry subreddits. When you hire them, they then leverage these accounts to mention your company in threads, among other tactics like creating and managing company subreddits.
This sounds great because it is an ‘easy button’ to what you’ve been made to believe is the solution to your AEO problems. But the reality is that these services regularly get accounts banned on Reddit, get sniffed out by moderators, and pose a reputational risk to your brand.
So, if you dig in as we did above and find that Reddit isn’t a top citation source for your brand, it starts to feel like a lot of downside with little (or no) upside. For me, I’ll always choose long-term brand reputation and sustainability over questionable growth hacks.
Reddit Content Quality
The last reason that I believe Reddit is not a long-term channel for most B2B companies is that the quality of the content in the threads being cited tends to be pretty lousy. Well, they are on par with most Reddit threads, but the disconnect between how the LLM packages the information and what was actually in the threads can be quite different.
I believe that Reddit was an easy source for breadth in the early days of LLMs, but to retain users, LLMs will begin to put more and more effort into quality and intent filters, much as Google has for years with the content it indexes and surfaces. This, in turn, would further drive down the number of times LLMs cite Reddit, making your Reddit marketing efforts that much less effective.
Wrapping Up
I hope this breakdown was helpful in understanding why Reddit should not be viewed as the top citation source for prompts without careful validation for your specific circumstances.
If you find that Reddit is a channel that makes sense for your brand and you want to invest in it for the long term, we recommend making this an in-house effort, similar to any other community management channel.
Just as it has been true in SEO for decades, there is no “easy button,” and anyone telling you there is does not have your best interests in mind. AEO, building a brand, and growing a company are all hard work that takes time and iteration.