Because people started adding the word Reddit to their searches, and search engines followed the behaviour. Buyers wanted opinions from real users instead of marketing pages. Google and the AI answer engines adjusted to serve that, and forum threads moved up. Your carefully written page now competes with a five year old comment thread.
This frustrates a lot of the founders we work with. They spend real money on a page, get the technical work right, and still watch a thread with eleven comments sit above them. It feels arbitrary. It is not.
Once you understand why those threads win, you can write pages that compete with them. The answer is not to give up on your blog and go post on Reddit. It is to understand the shape of content these systems reward, then build that shape on a site you actually own.
Scale plus format. Semrush's Reddit SEO analysis reports that Reddit's organic traffic increased by ten times since early 2023, and that 23.6 million pages on the site are currently cited in AI responses across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Google's AI Mode. That is an enormous surface area of first-hand answers.
The growth in AI answers is even sharper than the growth in classic search. Semrush reports that Reddit appeared in just 2,300 Google AI Overviews in November 2024 and now appears in more than 8.3 million of them. Semrush attributes part of this to the 2024 content agreement between Google and Reddit, which gave Google more access to Reddit data.
The scale point matters, but it is not the useful part for you. You are never going to out-publish Reddit. What you can copy is the format, and Semrush's research on what actually gets cited turns out to be much more actionable than the raw traffic numbers.
No, and this is the finding that changes how you should think about it. Semrush analysed 248,000 unique Reddit URLs cited across Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search, and found that 80% of cited posts have fewer than 20 upvotes and 70% have fewer than 20 comments. Popularity is not the mechanism.
Median upvotes on cited posts ran between five and eight in that study, with median comments between eleven and nineteen. These are small, quiet threads. They are not the front page of the internet. They are somebody answering a specific question in plain language, and a model finding it useful.
That should be encouraging. It means the citation is going to the content, not to the crowd. A page on your site with zero social engagement can be cited on exactly the same basis, provided it does the same job. This lines up with what we see across client work: the pages that get pulled into AI answers are usually not the ones with the most links, they are the ones that answer cleanly. We covered the mechanics of this in our piece on how to get cited by AI search engines.
Question and answer threads, above everything else. In the same Semrush study, over 50% of citations came from Q&A threads. Comparison posts and discussion posts followed, and together those three formats accounted for nearly 75% of all cited content. The format is doing most of the work.
Look at what those three have in common. Someone states a specific problem. Someone else answers it directly, from experience, without a preamble. There is no brand introduction, no scene setting, no three paragraphs of context before the point. The answer arrives first.
Now look at a typical company blog post. It opens with why this topic matters in today's fast moving landscape. The actual answer is in paragraph six. A model scanning for a direct response to a direct question will take the Reddit comment every time, and it is right to. The fix is structural, not a matter of writing more.
Be careful. Reddit communities are moderated by people who are very good at spotting marketing, and a promotional post gets removed and can get your domain banned from a subreddit. Participating genuinely is fine and often useful. Treating Reddit as a distribution channel usually backfires.
There is also a strategic problem with making Reddit your answer. Any visibility you build there sits on someone else's platform, under someone else's moderation rules, and can vanish without notice. Platform terms, moderation rules, and the licensing deals behind them all change without asking you first. Building your visibility on that surface is a rented position.
The better use of Reddit is as research. Read the threads that rank for your topics. They tell you exactly how your buyers phrase the problem, what objections they raise, and which parts of the standard advice they think are wrong. That is free, honest keyword and messaging research, and it is far more valuable than a post you sneak past a moderator.
You answer the question in the first two sentences, in plain language, without selling. Then you earn the rest of the page with detail a random commenter cannot provide. Reddit wins on directness and honesty. You win on depth, structure, and being right, but only after you have matched the directness.
Start with the heading. If people are asking whether a tool is worth it, your heading should be that question, not a clever phrase about the tool. Then the paragraph directly underneath it answers the question, takes a position, and does it in about forty to sixty words. That block is what gets lifted into an answer.
Then be specific in a way a thread cannot be. Reddit gives you one person's experience. You can give patterns across many projects, real numbers, and the reasoning behind them. On one client site we rebuilt, Offbeat Travel, organic traffic rose 190% after that kind of restructuring, and the pages that carried the lift were the ones that answered a question in the first line. Getting the question itself right matters more than most people think, which is why we wrote separately about matching search intent.
The last piece is honesty. Reddit threads rank partly because they say the unflattering thing. If the tool you are writing about is bad for small teams, say so. A page that admits a limitation reads as trustworthy to a human and gives a model a clear, quotable position to cite.
Only if you actually host user discussions. Google's documentation is direct about this. It says to only use DiscussionForumPosting markup to describe a user-generated post on a website, and not to use this markup for content that is primarily authored by the publishers of the website or their agents.
That rules it out for most company blogs. Your articles are written by you, so marking them as forum posts is misrepresenting them, and Google treats structured data that misrepresents content as a spam issue. This is not a loophole worth trying.
If you do run a real community, a customer forum, or a public support board, the markup applies and is worth implementing. Google also notes that if the structure of the forum site is primarily questions with answers, Q&A markup is the better fit, and that each post should include the entire text of the post rather than a truncated preview.
Start in Google Search Console with the queries where you have impressions but almost no clicks. Those are the searches where you appear and lose. Run the top ones manually and see what is above you. When it is a forum thread, you have found a page worth rewriting rather than a new page worth creating.
Pay attention to the shape of the losing queries. In our experience they cluster around decisions rather than definitions. Nobody goes to Reddit to learn what a content management system is. They go to find out whether a specific one is worth the money, what breaks after six months, and what the people who left it moved to.
Those decision-stage queries are where a marketing page is at its weakest and where an honest page from a working studio is at its strongest. The way to win them is to add something the thread does not have, which is the argument we made in our article on information gain.
Treat it as permanent in direction, temporary in detail. The underlying driver is that buyers trust peer experience over brand claims, and that is not a passing trend. The exact position of Reddit in results will move around as agreements, algorithms, and platform policies change.
The Semrush numbers themselves show how fast the detail moves. Going from 2,300 AI Overview appearances in November 2024 to over 8.3 million is not a stable equilibrium, it is a system still finding its level. Anyone telling you they know where it lands next year is guessing.
So do not build a strategy that depends on Reddit specifically. Build one that depends on the thing underneath it, which is that direct, honest, first-hand answers win. That has been true through every ranking change we have worked through, and it survives whichever platform is currently on top.
Pick the five queries that matter most to your business and search them yourself. If forum threads are winning, read them properly, then rewrite your competing page so the answer comes first and the honesty is real. That is a week of work, not a strategy overhaul.
Do not respond to this by publishing more posts. Volume is what you have already tried and it is not the missing piece. One page rewritten to answer directly will beat five new posts that bury the answer, and it will keep working in AI answers where the thin posts never appear at all.
If you want a second set of eyes on which of your pages are worth rewriting first, we are happy to walk through it with you. Send us the queries you are losing and we will tell you what we would change. You can find us at phoenix.studio, and we usually get back to people within 48 hours.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.