The Reddit Strategy That’s Winning in 2026 with Ross Simmonds

• Before creating any content or accounts, audit the top subreddits where your brand is mentioned.
• New accounts should spend time adding genuine value through comments before posting branded content.
• Claim reddit.com/user/yourcompanyname and reddit.com/r/yourcompanyname as soon as possible.
• Comments matter more than upvotes.
• Google tends to rotate results from a fixed pool of 5–8 subreddits per query.
• Don’t outsource your Reddit voice to AI. Reddit’s spam detection is sophisticated and mods are vigilant.
• If time is limited, Reddit ads can accelerate visibility.
• If negative Reddit threads are ranking for your brand name, no amount of content strategy will fully fix it unless the underlying issues are also addressed.

This is our second podcast episode with Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Marketing. The first episode after the launch of his book, Create Once, Distribute Forever. This time, we talked all about the hot topic in the marketing realm: Reddit.

Interest in Reddit has exploded in the past year because many studies have shown that Reddit content appears frequently in AI citations, and because Reddit has a licensing agreement with Google.

In this podcast, Ross helps walk through exactly how (and why) you should engage with Reddit to build your brand, as well as the many potential pitfalls to avoid in 2026.

Here is a slightly-edited transcription:

How is Reddit different than other social platforms?

Ross Simmonds

Yeah, I think when you think about Reddit, instead of viewing it as a social platform like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you should go back in time and view it as a forum. It’s a massive forum where people are having conversations about interests that they have. Those interests and those conversations can bubble up to the primary forum or they can live exclusively in a micro forum. What that means is on Reddit, there are these various subreddits and inside of these different subreddits are people who are super passionate about some of the most unique niches that you can imagine.

There are people who are interested in cats in hats and there would be a subreddit dedicated exclusively to pictures of cats wearing hats. Then there will be another subreddit dedicated to saunas where people are talking about their sauna installations, what their sauna looks like. There might be another subreddit that’s dedicated to the Philadelphia Eagles, and right now they’re all depressed and sad and cranky.

But then you have another subreddit that is dedicated to marketing, or another subreddit dedicated to consulting or outreach or PR.

There are all kinds of different communities on Reddit. And then if within that community the conversation gets a lot of upvotes, a lot of interest, and a lot of dialogue, it might make it to the greater Reddit front page, which is rare across most niches, especially in marketing and business. But if you happen to make it, you will probably get more traffic to your website than you have ever seen before.

Now, here’s the thing that has recently evolved with Reddit.

Over the last few years, more and more people around the globe have started to go to Google and add the word Reddit to their queries when they’re looking to buy a mattress, when they’re looking to buy shoes, when they’re trying to figure out where they should eat at lunchtime in a new city.

The reason why they are doing this is that they recognize that humans are better at giving them suggestions than a marketer. They have figured out that marketers have updated their websites and created all these blog posts filled with affiliate links talking about why this mattress is better than the next, why this restaurant is better than the next, and that it happens to be in their own interests.

So people started to add Reddit to their queries. Google recognized this, established a licensing agreement with Reddit, and I think some financial exchange took place, maybe even stocks before the IPO.

I don’t know, but at the end of the day, something took place that allowed for Reddit to see a massive increase in the amount of visibility that it had in Google. With that also came a licensing deal with ChatGPT, a licensing deal that led to an increase in the amount of citations from Reddit threads.

Now, why would Google or ChatGPT do this?

Simple.

They recognize the value of getting real people’s suggestions and feedback in front of their users. And Reddit has ridden the wave because of this, making it, truly for the first time I would say, living into its own mantra of being the front page of the internet.

How well do clients understand Reddit?

Ross Simmonds

We are still in the early stages of marketers understanding the value of this platform. You have essentially three groups of people. One group of people who have been on Reddit for a long time and they get it, they understand it, they embrace it.

They’re Redditors first and probably marketers second.

Then you have a group that is bought into this idea because they see the data, they see the opportunity, and they are trying to figure it out, but they are very afraid because they have heard the horror stories from the last decade-plus of marketers and brands that put memes on Reddit and then got ripped to shreds and told where to go and how to get there.

They have heard the stories about how quickly you can be blocked and they are nervous and timid of this platform.

And then there’s the third group who one day woke up, Googled their brand, and saw that the first page of Google with their brand name said things like “such and such company is a scam” or “such and such company you need to stay away from. Do not sign up. I just canceled my subscription with this software.

Avoid like the plague.

If you touch this business, you are burning your money.

And they are dripping with sweat, nervous, and have no idea what to do. They’re coming and saying, can you fix this Reddit thing that’s going on? And we’ll ask, are you willing to fix your business?

There are some fundamental issues here that need to be addressed.

And they’ll say, no, no, we just need you to fix the Reddit thing. Even though 20 minutes before that call, a new post was up saying the same thing as one from four years ago. They’re going to have a hard time.

So those tend to be the types of folks that we’re seeing.

What I would say is that we’re also seeing across all three of those audiences, people asking the question: is Reddit actually influencing the LLMs?

Is Reddit actually influencing the buyers?

How do we measure this?

Does this really influence anything?

And from the data that we’ve seen over two years of monitoring LLMs and trying to see how Reddit influences them, there’s no question that it does. We’ve been working with our partners around the globe to help them use Reddit to drive meaningful results, and it’s been a massive win across the board.

What are some common Reddit marketing strategies?

Ross Simmonds

Yeah, I think one of the first strategies I want to dive into is the reputation management piece.

With this one, we’re typically working with executive teams, PR leaders, sometimes founders and CEOs.

We’re working with a lot of the folks at the top who don’t like what they’re seeing and recognize that some of the queries on Reddit are influencing sometimes multimillion dollar deals.

They’re trying to shape and impact that.

Now, I’m a big believer in a simple mantra, and that is that you need to kill them with kindness when it comes to Reddit.

If you go on Reddit and you’re going to be confrontational, if you’re going to try to argue and yell at people, then good luck to you. It is not going to end well. It is you versus the mob, and I would not go up against them one-to-one.

So what you actually want to do is come into those channels, those communities, and first listen.

That is the first thing that brands need to do. Instead of saying we need to create Reddit accounts and just start posting, the first step is to actually listen to the communities and channels that are talking about you.

Do an audit of the top 20 subreddits where you want to be mentioned or that you are being mentioned, and then do an analysis of the conversations that are taking place.

Are certain problems occurring time and time again associated with reps, associated with features, associated with a lack of flexibility, associated with a competitor that is better than you? What is the ongoing, repeatable story that you are seeing?

Once you have those, what we tend to do is start thinking about story tracks. What are the stories that we have that are backed by evidence that we can use to shift this narrative in an effective way?

That might mean looking at case studies.

That might mean studying your G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra reviews for customers who have highlighted positive things about your business. It might mean we have to look internally at your product roadmap and say, look, people are hammering you over this. I think you should probably consider it.

And then from all of this intel and insight, we have a conversation around here’s the strategy for how we influence this on Reddit.

For some brands, it means creating your own subreddit and owning that, or getting keys to a subreddit that might be about your brand already and being added as a mod, or simply building mod relations with the person who runs that subreddit. Or it might mean creating a subreddit for your category in general and starting to seed and create conversations to eventually surpass the ones that have historically been there.

So we’re going to create a content calendar that is rooted in research around the stories and content that your audience wants. Let’s pretend that we’re doing this for BuzzStream. I might go to Reddit and find that all folks in the world of outreach, PR, and communications are really itching and dying to know more about how outreach can influence the LLMs.

So I would come to you, Vince, and say, maybe we should invest some time and energy in doing an in-depth audit on the impact of off-site brand mentions on LLM visibility.

That becomes a content idea that we’re going to go down the path with. This is not being published on Reddit. It’s going to be published on your site, but we’re going to go in depth and create this amazing resource that talks about how off-site signals can influence the LLMs. And we’re going to maybe partner with one of the various LLM tracking tools and bring it to life.

So we create this report.

I’m then going to study the top posts in the top 10 subreddits that your audience is on, and I’m going to look for format trends. Do they want that full report plopped right into Reddit with screenshots and visuals, or do they want a link? It’s likely that they don’t want a link. They just want the content there. So I’m going to take that report, post it in these various communities and channels, and it’s going to be from Vince from BuzzStream.

Now something special happens.

People look at Vince from BuzzStream and say, wow, thank you.

We’re so grateful that you took the time to understand our culture on Reddit. You gave us a valuable asset. Your brand is now associated with it.

And you just happen to create this post, maybe using some keywords in the subject that aligns with your visibility strategy. And then you are building a bunch of karma because people are upvoting it, they’re commenting on it, they might click your profile, they might click follow, they might click on your website, they might go into your funnel. All of those things start to happen.

So that becomes one element of our strategy.

Now, I mentioned earlier that some brands will create their own subreddit. You can cross-post too. So maybe you put that up in your own subreddit but then repost it in others so it’s getting further reach and distribution into different channels. For most companies, they’ll look at that and say, we could do that once a quarter and that’s great.

The best companies recognize that that is just one asset among other daily activities that are going to be associated with this account. So when someone is asking a question, “what are the best tools for outreach?” you happen to be there responding to that question. Or if someone’s asking, “what are the best go-to-market strategies in 2026?” you happen to be in that subreddit.

Our startups have nothing to do with outreach, but you’re going to be there talking about some of your own perspective on go-to-market while subtly referencing BuzzStream within that post.

And then from this, you’re going to start to increase the amount of times the brand is mentioned across Reddit, which will hopefully start to shift the sentiment.

And of course, once you are doing that, there’s a ton of other things you could do, like take blog posts that your team is producing and schedule those to be shared directly in your own subreddit in advance. So you’re always on 365 days a year. All of those things compound over time to increase your surface area on this platform.

How active do you need to be on Reddit?

Ross Simmonds

So there’s this thing on Reddit called karma, and you build up karma by adding value to the community.

The more karma you have, the easier time you will have on Reddit to do whatever you want.

So if you’re going into Reddit for the first time, my recommendation is not that you go in and start being aggressive with your posts and content, but instead to go in aggressively around one concept and one idea: add as much value in the comments as possible. You need to go in value-driven.

And value doesn’t always mean education.

You can add value on Reddit by just being funny. If you can crack a joke, if you have any type of sense of humor, if you have any type of ability to have a pun or a reference that only a niche community will get, people will eat that up and your karma will go through the roof.

So the first phase of an initiative is warming up your account so you have karma credibility, so you can go into different communities and engage and respond, and the mods will give you respect because they can go into your profile and see, this person’s not here just to spam. This person’s here to actually engage on Reddit.

So when you do that, and then you start to add your long-form posts, you then start to push the brand first. That’s how you win.

Should you build branded Reddit accounts?

Ross Simmonds

Yeah, I always recommend being transparent about being from a brand and representing it.

If you are the founder, then you can use whatever name you want.

If you have identity connection to an organization, do whatever you want.

But from an organizational risk perspective, I always recommend organizations to have the Reddit user as a representative of the business, so that if that employee leaves, the company still owns that asset versus it leaving with that individual. We try to always encourage folks to have two key user accounts: one, the brand account.

So reddit.com/user/yourcompanyname. You should set that up as soon as possible. If you’re listening to this, go to Reddit, type in that URL. One of two things is going to happen. Either you’re going to get an error and that means nobody has it, and that’s good news.

Congratulations, sign up and create that account. Or someone does have it, and that’s not good news.

Now I hope you have a trademark. If you have a trademark, you can submit that to Reddit and Reddit will potentially be able to help you get ownership of that account, especially if that account is old. But if it’s brand new, that might be a little tough because that user is actively using the brand name.

The next thing you want to consider is your branded subreddit. So a branded subreddit would be reddit.com/r/brandname. I think you should try to own that too.

There’s no trademark world around this one — you simply have to create it. If you get an error, good job, create your account and run. If somebody else has already created it, you’re going to want to reach out to the mods to try to get access added, or send out a company-wide email to see if any of your employees already have it and are one of the mods.

Now, to your question around how to structure the username, I think “firstname from businessname” is the correct and best approach.

And I’m also not against taking a page out of Geico’s book and creating a personified alias around the business.

So you could have a Billy from BuzzStream, so to speak. Billy doesn’t really exist, but you can create a character around Billy who is hyper conversational and engaging and knows everything about outreach and is fun and engaging.

So I think you can go down that path as well, but I definitely encourage people to have that account.

Now, once these accounts are built, there’s another thing you want to consider, and that is the level of activity, which we just spoke about.

I do believe having daily activity is important. When we’re working with our partners, we have daily reactive content where we’re proactively identifying threads that are ranking in the LLMs, conversations that are trending within our story tracks, and then we’re responding to those, sometimes with GIFs and images just to build up karma, sometimes with a brand message, sometimes supporting customer service or PR metrics.

So you do want that daily activity happening across these various subreddits regularly.

And then what you will also find interesting is that eventually, magic starts to happen in the DMs.

As you build your accounts, you’ll start to see DMs from people saying, “hey, I’d love to learn more about what you folks offer at X, Y, and Z. Let’s have a conversation.” And then we’ll share that with the clients via Slack and they’ll pick up on those dialogues.

Now here’s one other risk I want to make sure that companies hear and understand.

Reddit is not always a safe-for-work platform. If you have employees using a Reddit account, it is very easy for them to be engaging and interacting with things that aren’t necessarily what you want the brand to be associated with. That is a very thin line.

When you have an employee running around on Reddit engaging with anything that is in their own interest, and you don’t know that that person happens to be interested in some unusual things, and they’re a mod on your company account — that’s one path towards a PR crisis.

So I really encourage folks to have a governance strategy around how we show up on Reddit.

I think people’s personal lives are their personal accounts. I think they should keep them and do whatever they want.

But on the corporate side, when we’re playing the capital game, we have to put on the hat of the business and stay out of the messiness.

Should you always focus on Reddit conversations that impact the bottom line?

Ross Simmonds (24:07) Bottom-of-funnel queries and responding to and inspiring those types of dialogues can be done directly in your product and you don’t even need a Reddit account.

Like if you encourage your customers — instead of at the end of an NPS survey always saying “leave us a review on this review site,” you might start saying “leave us a review on Reddit.” You might see a spike. Or in your SMS campaigns, instead of always saying “leave us a review on this site,” you might start saying “leave us a review on Reddit.”

Those things can inspire a new wave of conversations that are positive and organic. It’s UGC from a bunch of different accounts. Some of those accounts maybe have the “mature” signal on them, you never know what you’re going to get — they’re customers — but they’re going to be engaging on those channels.

What you also want to consider, to your point, is what’s in your circle of control. Can you produce assets that are going to target bottom-of-funnel queries? A

bsolutely, especially in your own subreddit. That’s something you can proactively develop. One of the other things I would encourage folks to do is not be afraid of paid. If you supplement organic with paid, you can grow your presence on these channels at a much faster rate. You can increase the velocity of conversations on Reddit and positively influence the sentiment and the story around your brand.

We would encourage you to actually pair your organic with paid if time is a constraint.

Now the last piece I would flag is the top of funnel. A lot of organizations immediately think they just need to care about TOFU and MOFU — alternative pages, comparison-style assets, migration-style assets, competitor pages — and those are all very important for Reddit.

But brand queries are actually one of the main reasons why people reach out to us. Because when someone is typing in your business’s name, Reddit is right underneath it. It’s not ranking because it says “alternatives” in the title. It’s because this Reddit thread has 80 comments from people who used your product, and they might have said good things or bad things. So what you want to do is also care about brand-related queries and try to inspire positive brand-related content in subreddits that are ranking.

This is a free piece of insight I haven’t shared with anyone publicly.

We did this analysis across hundreds of thousands of queries, and when we look at most of them, Google identifies subreddits that are related to the query itself. And then within those subreddits, it’s looking for the keywords within them and then surfacing them in the search results.

So if you look at a certain query, you’ll typically see five to eight subreddits across the entire page of forums. Those subreddits are the only ones that typically influence Google, unless you can inspire a conversation in another subreddit that has more comments and more upvotes than the ones that have already been indexed.

Otherwise, there’s just a rotation of popular conversations within that batch of subreddits, unless you can break the mold with a whole new subreddit and drive a significant amount of new conversations, which isn’t easy to do. We’ve done it, but it’s not easy to do.

So my recommendation here is that folks understand the subreddits that Google is associating with your brand, category keywords, and your niche, and then use those as your prioritization.

You don’t need to be everywhere. Let’s focus on the subreddits that Google believes are associated with your category and your brand, and then be active there regularly, inspire more conversations there, run ads there to drive up more dialogue, dilute any negative, and increase the positive.

Vince Nero

Yeah, I love that. I’m trying to wrap my head around freshness and seeding these threads. I remember back with Siege Media that if a post got a certain number of upvotes, it became a followed link. Before, on Reddit, it was always a nofollow link until it got like 20 or 100 upvotes, and maybe it was category or subreddit-specific. But I wonder if there’s something similar happening with what Reddit is surfacing.

Ross Simmonds

I think there’s a weighted association with upvotes, absolutely. But I would now weight comments more than upvotes. The comments matter more than the upvotes because even in the LLMs, what we’re seeing is it’s not just the top answer in a thread being cited — it’s the comments being cited. So if someone asks the question “what is the best CRM?” and Reddit is cited, it’s not always the number one answer. Sometimes it’s like the fourth answer in that happens to have the most replies that is being cited in Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera. So it’s a fascinating world. But yeah, it’s a fun one to try to crack.

Is Reddit good enough at filtering out spam?

Ross Simmonds

Two things can be true at the same time.

One, absolutely spammable. Two, Reddit is the best at identifying spam, AI, and astroturfing of any platform that I’ve seen, and I’m on all of them.

Reddit has some of the most sophisticated algorithms, IP address tracking, VPN detection, cloaking triggers — their sophistication level is high. My suggestion to folks is to play the game the correct way, because if they sniff it out — especially the mods, who take their job very seriously, some of them aren’t even paid and they take it more seriously than their nine to five — if they get a sniff that your account is associated with other accounts and that you are talking about a certain brand, they will block that brand from being mentioned in the entire subreddit.

Period. You’re done.

I’ve seen it.

I have gotten probably six leads in the last 12 months from people who went with a shady Reddit marketer who just popped out of nowhere, read a few pieces of content online, decided to buy a bunch of phones and create fake accounts, and said, “I can promise you hundreds of comments every day.”

And they do it.

And then they get blocked and banned, and the client is asking why. And then the person they were working with disappears off the face of the internet and all they’ve got is a Discord channel. Now their brand is blocked from the number one channel where they were being talked about before.

What do they do? I personally don’t play with fire when I’m talking about multi-million dollar deals. If you are a startup, go play, go have fun, do your thing. But if you are a giant — play silly games, win silly prizes.

Are there tools for monitoring Reddit?

Ross Simmonds

So there was one I was using a lot called Gummy Search.

Gummy Search is kind of being deprecated because the API costs were too high. So what we’re relying on now are the Reddit API directly and some of the traditional search tools.

We use things like SEMrush to do a comparison of reddit.com versus every client’s name and look at that overlap to see where they intersect, then compare threads versus URLs and what keywords they’re going after. We leverage Ahrefs, Profound, and Athena. We have way too many subscriptions to LLM trackers, but we monitor on a regular basis what Reddit threads are being cited in the LLMs.

And then we’re also using Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, to do scrapes of long-form pages within subreddits.

So we’ll take all of the subreddits, upload that to a database, and then conduct analysis using things like Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to better understand what the sentiment is and whether it’s changing.

That’s been a bit of our workaround.

Now there are some workflow tools for producing content that have been interesting to see.

AirOps has a great feature that lets you take insights from trending Reddit threads and reply to them.

It is important, and I want to make this caveat crystal clear to everyone.

I do not recommend that you use AI to write your full answer on Reddit.

I believe if you do that, you’re going to get flagged and blocked very quickly. As such, you should edit before you hit send and customize it. That’s why we have editors and real writers on the keyboard. This is another thing I haven’t shared publicly: I also think that Reddit has a tracker that tracks, in the draft phase, whether you paste in content and post it quickly.

If it’s not written natively, I think it’s tracking in the comments and drafting section that this is copy-and-paste and then triggering an AI review of those pieces.

There’s no clear data to support it, but I have gotten hints that if you don’t write it out and it just goes up quickly, you’re going to get a signal and get into some banning issues.

Should everyone be on Reddit?

Ross Simmonds

Yeah, so everyone should be doing it if they have validated that Reddit is influencing their buyers, their customers, and the way people make decisions within their category.

How do you measure whether or not the work you’re doing is actually translating into ROI? The most important thing is always being able to measure the revenue, pipeline, and traffic.

As I said before, we’re playing the capital game, so let’s measure the capital. Are you seeing an increased deal size where people are saying that they heard of you from Reddit?

Are you tracking directly in your CRM that yes, the source was Reddit referral traffic, and that led to deals, pipeline, leads, MQLs, SQLs?

If that is true, then that is the cream of the crop. That’s what you want. That’s the holy grail metric.

Then there are intermediary metrics that are also worth looking at.

These are things like whether or not you have a positive sentiment shift on Reddit. You are just tracking and monitoring whether sentiment is shifting from negative to positive. You’re also looking at the number of threads that you have created that are influencing the LLMs. So you’re tracking on a regular basis how many of the threads that are now being cited you can take credit for.

If you look at January 2026 and then look at January 2027, after you’ve spent a full year creating Reddit content, how many of the threads that are now being cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Mode, et cetera, are ones that you and your company have either inspired or created?

If the vast majority of those are ones you’ve created, then what you want to do is actually do the math.

You’re going to take the keywords or prompts that you are associating these rankings with, and I like to look at: if there are 20,000 people looking for this each year, what is the cost per click associated with that volume? If we assume — and you can check the traffic via Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, or whatever — what is the average traffic volume that these threads are getting?

Then you multiply that CPC by the average estimated traffic volume that you are getting to these Reddit threads. And that is the value of savings that you have provided the team because they are no longer having to spend that on PPC.

What’s also a great thing to talk about is the fact that we live in a no-click world. We live in a world where people aren’t clicking things anymore.

They’re getting the answer directly on Google AI Overviews and making their decision. So what do you want to do? You track the search volume and you can start to estimate, based on how many deals were generated organically, how many deals you likely influenced by now being a part of the response and having Reddit cited.

That becomes a tough one to talk about because it requires a few mental gymnastics, but it’s worthwhile understanding because that’s the world we live in now.

What do you want to leave our listeners with?

Ross Simmonds

Yeah. The biggest thing — and we did touch on it, but I want to put an exclamation mark on it — is that a lot of marketers today are going through this period of activity tactics. Let’s go, let’s build, let’s write, let’s create, let’s ship, let’s do things all the time. I think there’s some value in that, but I also think there is a clear need to actually understand where we’re going. You can go fast and be intentional with channels like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google — all of these things. But if you’re going in the wrong direction, you’re going to make mistakes that might not be easy to fix.

So I encourage brands and marketers to take a step back before they sign up for some random person on Fiverr to do their Reddit strategy, before they just go on a whim and start creating content on Reddit. Instead, take the time — it could be a month — to strategically understand the platform, the culture, the community, the subreddits, the channels, and the way they show up, instead of jumping right in. Because as I said earlier, a lot of the first group we talked about were Redditors first and marketers second. And as somebody who was a Redditor first and is still a marketer second, if you go on Reddit and believe that you can just spam the community, people will find you and they will block you and they will make sure that your life is not easy. It is not the place to go and just fill it up with links. Trust me, I’ve been blocked and banned 18 times over the last 15 years and I’ve lived to tell the story. So don’t do it.

Vince Nero

Ross, this is awesome. Thank you so much for joining, man.

Ross Simmonds

Vince, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It’s absolutely always a blast to chat with you. And I’ve said it a million times, I’m a major fan of BuzzStream and what you folks do for the industry. You guys have always been at the forefront of adding value to the marketing industry, and I’d love to see you continue and carry the torch with the podcast.