Why Does Reddit Dominate AI Overviews and AI Search Results?

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Why has Reddit become a power player in AI search? Because its structure, user-generated discussions, and lived-experience answers align closely with how AI systems evaluate trust, context, and relevance.

In this episode of Found in AI, Cassie is joined by SEO strategist Beth Chernes to break down why Reddit now appears so frequently in AI-powered search experiences—including Google’s AI Overviews—and what that means for founders and marketers trying to stay visible.

The conversation explores how the Google–Reddit partnership is reshaping discovery, how Reddit data is used to train large language models, and why transparency and participation matter more than promotional tactics on user-generated platforms.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why Reddit is dominating Google’s AI Overviews right now
• How Reddit data is training large language models — and what that means for brands
• The right and wrong ways to participate in subreddits
• How to use Reddit for social listening and pain-point research
• Why transparency matters more than ever on community-driven platforms
• How to think about ROI from Reddit without spamming or self-promotion
• One small Reddit experiment anyone can run this week

If you’re trying to understand why Reddit shows up so often in AI-generated answers and how to use the platform without getting banned, downvoted, or ignored, this episode offers a practical, realistic starting point.

Let’s connect:
LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Content Strategist
Website → cassieclarkmarketing.com

Keywords: AI Search, Reddit Marketing, Google–Reddit Partnership, Generative Search, AEO, GEO, AI Visibility, User-Generated Content, SEO Strategy, Subreddit Research, Social Listening, B2B Marketing, Search Trends, Digital Visibility

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening 3 specialized audit slots for January 2026 to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Transcript

0:16

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) If you've been a longtime listener of the show, you know Reddit gets mentioned in nearly every single episode. Well today we are finally talking about why it's now a power player in AI Search. Welcome back to Founded AI, the show about getting your brand discovered in this new wave of AI Search. I'm your host Cassie Clark, fractional content strategist and founder of Cassie Clark Marketing. We are officially back for Thanksgiving break. You bet I'm already caffeinated beyond reason. If I sound funny, I have acquired cooties from someone I visited over the holiday. Looking at you, brother-in-law, pretty sure. Anyway, today I got to bring on someone I've worked with for years and absolutely adore, Beth Chernis. She's an SEO strategist who has been in the trenches of Google long enough to know all of the ins and outs of the platform. She helps accounting firms, financial brands, B2B companies, and nonprofits get found in both Google and AI engines. And she's one of my go-to experts anytime I have a question about SEO strategy. In this episode, Beth and I dig into the real impact of the Google-Reddit partnership, why Reddit is suddenly absolutely everywhere in AI overviews, and how marketers can use Reddit the right way, you know, without getting banned, downloaded, or set on fire by the mods. Here's part of that conversation. So, hey, I am Beth Chernis. I run a boutique agency called Beth Chernis& Co. and I do SEO strategy and content marketing for financial firms, including accounting firms, and B2B businesses, along with nonprofit organizations. Basically, I help them get visibility in Google and LLM so that they can bring in new leads and generate more revenue and grow their firms. So, when I think SEO, you are the first person I think of because you are like the queen of SEO over here. I love that I have royalty for search algorithms. You do. You do. So, we're talking about Reddit today, like a whole episode dedicated to just Reddit since we talk about it all the time. So, can you explain the Google-Reddit partnership and what that matters, like why it matters for SEO and AI visibility? Yeah, no problem, Cassie. So, if you've been on Google lately, you'll probably notice that when you do certain search terms, you'll see at the top of the results, after AI overviews, you'll see Reddit results. So, back in February of 2024, Google entered a partnership with Reddit to basically use all the Reddit user-generated data to train their algorithm, like their Gemini, basically the AI. So, that partnership was both beneficial to Reddit, but also Google, and because of that, since that point, the Reddit results are showing higher in search results because they want people to click, because they want to get user-generated data from Reddit. It's also become a little bit more closer just because you're seeing it also now in AI overviews, which is why being on Reddit can be really useful for many brands and businesses, both for sourcing information from those users, but also responding to things that are relevant. So, I know back in the early days, and when I say early days, this was like March, when people would search how to make pizza or something, it would come up with put glue in it, because that was a Reddit answer. Have you seen stuff like that still? It's been a bit. I think it's better now. I don't know who's on Reddit saying to put glue in pizza, but... Reddit is a weird place. It sure is. So, from AEO, answer engine optimization standpoint, how does contributing to Reddit threads help train that language model that we're talking about and help your brand be seen or your expertise be cited? So, I think when we're moving into optimizing for everything, so for both the algorithm, but also now the LLMs coming out, it's all about brand visibility. So, if Google is scraping Reddit for information, but also if people are looking for actual answers from other people, having your brand named in any of these relevant Reddit sub-threads in a positive way is going to be helpful for your brand. But that means you need to be in those sub-Reddits that are relevant I think that there's no negative of being there unless you're doing it the wrong way. So, what would the right way look like? Basically, number one is identifying the relevant sub-Reddits that are for your brands and reviewing their rules, because all of these sub-Reddits are managed by unpaid gatekeepers, all the mods. So, making sure you are adhering to any of those rules before you join, being really transparent about those. Number two, being very transparent about your own content on Reddit and your use of branded content. So, that means when you're sharing things about your brands of always disclosing that you're part of that brand or that you get, if you were sharing like anything that was an affiliate link that you were getting a kickback. But basically, you want to be very clear that you are who you are and why you're saying this. Otherwise, they'll come out with the pitchforks and torches, because no one wants fake people selling them stuff. I think number three is also you do need to have sufficient resources to properly moderate a branded sub-Reddit. So, like, if you decide to create your own branded sub-Reddit, like, you know, your brand, my that's why I want to have my own branded sub-Reddit when we talk about my business. You need someone to mod it, to make sure people are adhering to things. But I think that's also true if you're commenting regularly in certain sub-Reddits. You need someone in your organization who's going to monitor those subs, as well as respond quickly to other DMs or to comments on the thread. So, like, does your company have the resources for that? It's a really important internal question, because if it's not, if you don't, then you could be opening your brand up to some liabilities or just negative comments that no one responds to, or, like, losing possibility. I think also number four, like, things I would recommend is, like, if you decide to go onto Reddit and explore that to set up some tracking codes or UTMs, so you know people, like, when people click resources that you share, that you actually know that they clicked it through Reddit, so you can see the ROI, because, again, it goes back to having someone, the resources to monitor Reddit, if it's, you need to know if it's valuable. So having tracking is going to be really important. And then I think just number five is just always, like, review all of Reddit's performance rules, like everything, all the guidelines, make sure you are sticking to anything that's required, because you don't want to be kicked out of Reddit. Right, right, yeah. I know Christina Prunes had talked about how she got banned very quickly from Reddit. But I want to ask you a question. So Josh Vilker from AirOps was on a couple weeks ago, we were talking about the role of the content engineer. So in relation to, like, a marketing team, content team, who would be the best person to go in there and do this marketing? Sorry, continue your question. Yeah, I just wonder if, like, what would be, like, an ideal setup for that? Someone that does, like, social and community, or the social media manager? Like, how would that work? Because it seems like a whole new thing. Yeah, so I guess I would try to parse out what you're using Reddit for. So number one, if you're talking about that community, like, community manager, someone who's going to go in there, post about your brand, comment on threads, and, like, engage, that's a different person than we're going on Reddit to gather information about our target clients, and we're just listening. So I think those are two different roles, because one can be very passive. And you're just listening and not commenting. You're just seeing, like, brand mentions or conversations in certain areas that are, like, related to your ideal clients or the subject matter you want to talk, make content about. But that community manager, that first person, like, who's literally going on the subreddits and saying things, they should probably be a social media specialist or someone who is familiar with rules and related to social media, especially branding, your brand guidelines of how you answer things. And so I would even say that at the higher level, the CMO or VP marketing should be working with the team to come up with Reddit brand guidelines. So that could be how we speak about the brand on Reddit versus other areas, because it could be different, because Reddit's its own area. It's its own beast. If you sound like AI on Reddit, no one will like you. They'll say things about you being AI, and then you get banned. We can see this happen. I almost want to say that, like, if this was something that a company wants to pursue as, like, an active engagement, whether it's creating your own branded subreddit or going into subreddits and, like, being an active community member, I think it needs to come at the highest level of the marketing department to determine what are the goals, what is that, like, ultimate goal of this time commitment resources, and also the brand guidelines. So I think it's easy to, like, want to go try something. And you could, like, you can go try it first before you do all of that extra work. But I think you don't want to be kicked out. And since it is user moderated, you have a higher likelihood when people just don't like what you say, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's two things that you kind of hit on that really, I think, are driving the point with the Reddit. If you're using it to seed your brand across subreddits, there's a very specific way to do it. But then you also mentioned, like, social listening. So for my own marketing, for scheme marketing, like, what I've been doing with that is setting up the chat GPT agent, just be like, hey, look in these subreddits. Like, I know you're real big on, like, keyword research and that kind of thing. Have you been doing that too? Like, looking to Reddit to see what people are saying, and then adding those specific phrases back into your content? A hundred percent. Yes. Well, like half of my copy related to when I, so I have a lead magnet out. So I have a case study I wrote about how I helped a accounting firm generate over $2 million of revenue through SEO and digital marketing. And so a lot of that writing was obviously the case study. But when you were trying to do selling points or like things to grab other people's attention, I looked at the pain points in the accounting and SEO subreddits related to helping firms be found on Google. So like a lot of accounting subreddits, sometimes they talk about marketing and a more generalized term, but I took all of that and looked at exact phrasing to kind of decide like pain point of when you read like the case study, it addresses pain points, but like these pain points come from actual accountants, not just my clients, but other accountants that are complaining either about what's happening with it, not being found online. And I think that I didn't always, I mean, sometimes I commented on things that was relevant, but really I was sitting there just listening and taking ideas. And I think, especially if we're using any LLMs to like do research or to train your LLM about your target audience, those subreddits are full of like, as I say, a gold mine of information, like literally out of the mouth of the clients or leads or people that you're serving. So yeah. We just redid, like we rebranded from Thought Tree to Scheme, like announcing that today, officially on the podcast. Yeah, it's exciting. One of the things I did for the copy for like the landing page, went straight to Reddit, like what are the things people are saying about this specific tool? You put it all in there. I'm really curious to see if that'll affect like how the brand shows up in AI search and SEO, sure. But AI search, I'm really curious to see how that changes. If it's like specific to the questions people have been asking. It's one of the things I'll be tracking lately. So go ahead. No, I'm agreeing with you. I was going to just say that it's interesting that you mentioned AI search, because when we talk about Reddit, it's literally what people are asking, because they're asking each other questions. Like it could be something as benign as like, which makeup versus which makeup for this? And I mean, it's literally a question someone's asking ChatGPT. Yeah, it's like funnel content. It's like right back at it. And especially as the algorithm shifts, has shifted, the keywords are still important, but it's also the phrasing, right? The questions people are asked. So like, it's great to know this one keyword related to like, makeup, but like, knowing that people are comparing on these two specific things for this particular issue, versus just a general keyword term, which wouldn't really dig as deep as what, you know, when you're on a ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever. It's like one question. It's not. And then it goes to the questions later. Yeah, 20 million later. I'm forever playing the 20 question game. Yeah. Go back. Thank you very much. Are my overlord one day? Hopefully you knew I had manners. Yeah, always using please. So practical steps about Reddit marketing. So if we if we want to use Reddit to contribute to SEO or AEO, right way to approach that not spamming these communities for wine. Yeah, yeah. If you're if you're doing like the content strategy aspect where you're like social listening, as you mentioned, I think I would start from number one, like defining your target audience. So if you are, you know, as I mentioned, like for me, I work with financial firms and accounting firms, I know what threads to go to it stuff related to finance, it's related to accounting. Sometimes it's nonprofits, you're like looking and you can go dig very deep into those subreddits. But like, you need to have defined that audience before you need to know that, you know, all of the background information, just like you would for any content marketing strategy or copywriting strategy. And then what you would do is find the relevant subreddits related to that. And you can use I just use the like the internal like the tool on Reddit, but there's other like outside tools you can use that probably give you the same information. And then I'd probably, I mean, honestly, you just look and see where the what questions are being asked. Let's look at the keyword kind of thing, you'll pull a keyword in the Reddit and see where the questions lead you. And then use that to uncover some insights. And then I would also map them in different content formats, like you get the insights, for example, you found the answer to whatever the topic was being talked about the subreddit, how are you going to display that you're a blog post, a social post? Are you doing carousels? Like, what are you going to do with that information now that you have it? Yeah, having a repository? Yeah, yeah. Because I know one of the biggest piece of advice that a couple other guests have said, and it's all over LinkedIn right now, it's you need to be everywhere that your customer is. So if that's like YouTube, make YouTube videos, if it's on a podcast, and then listen to podcasts. So I think that's a great tip. So you could just use it for all of your content. Whatever, all of your content. Okay, so two more questions. Reddit is famously allergic to overt self promotion. But if you were just talking about those bans, how do you walk that line between being helpful and perceived as hey, this is a marketing person runaway? I think number one, it's always starts with transparency. So making sure that when you're in the Reddit subs, that you are very clear about who you are, what you work for, like identifying yourself. And I see this myself in subreddits, people who share information, they disclose that, hey, I'm working on this tool, if you wanted to check it out, etc, etc. I also think that it you need to build trust. So that means sometimes commenting on things that are in the sub that you want to be in, but not necessarily about your brand, you can't just show up where it's benefiting you, you need to show up where you can share information that benefits others. And sometimes that may be about competitors. So I think the most trustworthy brands or people on sub on the subreddits are people who are willing to share information about competitors, that's not necessarily all negative, that they're really and they're trying to give value as well. I think just like all of content marketing, you're trying to give value. But like, I would also approach Reddit as these are other people you're connecting with. We hopefully they're not all bots. And so you should show up and be a person too. You've heard of the dead internet theory though, right? Have you heard about that? Yes, I've heard of it. Yeah. What's your thoughts? Because I'm curious. Do you mean the idea that eventually the robots are all training each other? Do you mean that one? They're all talking to one another. Everyone's coming. Everyone is in a robots are commenting on every post. I feel like that's a really depressing and to the creation of the internet. Like, I think but that's also that if we know that that is something that is possible, what can we do now to stop that as being an inevitability? So I think we're seeing that all throughout all content marketing is trying to find personalization. And so I think that's also true of Reddit is that remembering that it is a popular platform because it's user generated content. I mean, look at Twitter from what it was a few years ago. Oh, it's not Twitter anymore. It's X. But when it was Twitter, people were commenting on things and you knew you were talking like you assumed you're talking to a person most of the time, but like you actually had connections and there was threads. And I think it's happened to all social media platforms. So not just calling out X. But as as the corporations add more ads, and they add more AI generated things, people don't want to be there. You want people to be on Reddit if you're on Reddit trying to either share your information or learn about your users. So show up being authentic. Okay, last question. If someone wanted to test like a Reddit experiment this week, what's the one tiny thing that they could do? Or like, would you recommend that they're running? I mean, if you're just like listening, just go on to the subreddit you think is the most interesting for whatever your purpose is. And just well, number one, look for your brand on Reddit. Number one, go look for your brand on Reddit. See if they're mentioned. They might be. Yeah, okay. I've had clients that we found them on Reddit. And I and that's great, because we're going to share like, hey, this is where you need to be, right? This is a sub that they felt like someone mentioned you. And then I've had clients where they're not being mentioned on Reddit, but it's not a focus area for them. Like it's also, if this is important to you, then you invest the resources if it aligns with your goals and your tactics and all that. But for some, it may not be where your audience is. Although I think every audience is probably on Reddit. This episode sparked something for you about Reddit, AI visibility and how people are actually searching today. Perfect. That's exactly what I had hoped would happen. Here's your experiment for the week. And I swear it's simple. Step one, go search your brand name on Reddit. Just go see what Redditors are saying about your brand. Zero mentions means you have an absolutely clean slate. A few mentions even better. That's data. Step two, if you don't already have a Reddit account, now is the time to make one. Don't overthink it. You're not building a persona. You're just warming up the account so the algorithm doesn't treat you like a bot. Then go drop a couple of genuine, genuine comments. Upvote a handful of threads. And more importantly, act like a normal person who isn't there to sell anything. Redditors will sniff you out, I promise. All of this with the genuine comments, upvoting a handful of threads and acting like a real person is going to get you miles farther for when you do decide to engage strategically. Step three, bookmark one subreddit your audience actually lives in. Just one, not 50 of them. Not every related subreddit to your brand, just one. Then check it once this week and start paying attention to the phrasing people use. I promise you're going to start hearing the real pain points way faster than you would in any keyword research tool. Now remember, Reddit is one of the few places left online where people still talk like actual human beings, and this is exactly why AI models scrape it so aggressively. Hey, if you want more tiny, doable experiments like this, subscribe to Fab and AI wherever you're listening. Episodes drop nearly every week, even when the holidays try to take me out. And if you want help making your brand actually show up in AI engines, grab the free AI visibility resources waiting for you over at CassieClarkMarketing.com. Go find me on LinkedIn or subscribe to my channel over on YouTube. Okay, that's it. I will see you next week.