Reddit, AI, and the Rewiring of Brand Discovery

As AI models increasingly pull from Reddit’s unfiltered conversations rather than polished brand content, John Barham, Managing Partner, ROAST examines why the future of visibility depends on platforms where traditional marketing tactics can backfire.

Something fundamental has changed in organic search – triggering a monumental impact on how brands are being discovered. And it’s already eroding the foundations of the marketing systems many brands have relied on for years.

For over a decade, SEO has been the most dependable digital engine of visibility, offering predicable returns if you invested (and implemented) sensibly. You could measure it, optimise it, scale it. It rewarded consistency and hard-earned technical ability, with the volatility from large engine algorithm updates largely a thing of the past.

In 2025, that reliability shifted and going into 2026 it will continue evolving at an increased pace. 

AI Is Rewiring Discovery

AI-driven tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the new generation of conversational search engines, have changed the way people access information. They don’t serve search results; they serve answers. They summarise, synthesise, and deliver insights directly to users – often without sending traffic anywhere.

That shift is theoretically subtle to users but tangibly seismic if you are responsible for growing organic traffic and revenues. Brands that once relied on search visibility for steady inbound traffic are seeing those numbers flatten or even drop. Even top-ranked pages aren’t pulling the same volume as they were 12 months ago as user queries are being serviced by AI results.

From 2020 to 2025 it is estimated that zero click searches (a search where a user never clicks through to one of the search results) on Google have jumped from 60% to up to 85%, with recent leaps fuelled by AI Overviews.

As AI intermediates more of the discovery journey, the correlation between traditional organic visibility and revenue is breaking.

Why Reddit Suddenly Matters

In this new environment, Reddit has become an unlikely protagonist. AI models are referencing Reddit more than ever, because it contains what algorithms struggle to generate: human perspective. It’s unstructured, opinionated, contradictory – and that makes it powerful.

Reddit’s user-generated, largely text-based content is indirectly shaping how AI interprets brand sentiment, product feedback and consumer queries. For brands, that’s both a huge opportunity and a risk. Reddit is where opinions form before they surface elsewhere, but it’s also one of the least brand-friendly environments online.

As part of this new equation, Reddit itself has enjoyed incredibly rapid growth in the past two years, especially surprising for what was an already long-established platform. With an 88% increase in UK users over this period, it has also recently overtaken TikTok as the fourth most visited social platform in this market. It has become the power behind the AI throne and is reaping its own direct benefits as well.

The Challenge of Authenticity

Reddit’s community can have an almost allergic reaction to overt marketing. Users value transparency, peer insight, and lived experience – not corporate messaging. Attempts at direct participation, such as brand-run “Ask Me Anything” sessions, can potentially backfire. Even with good intentions, threads can quickly devolve into customer service complaints or cynical pushback.

That doesn’t mean brands should avoid Reddit altogether (in fact, they can no longer afford to if they want AI visibility). It just means they must approach it with clear guidelines and expectations.

The smartest strategies are indirect.

• Encourage organic discussion by seeding interesting data or thought-provoking ideas that the community can pick up on their own.
• Partner with credible voices – not influencers, but participants who already have standing within niche subreddits.
• Or, if direct engagement is too risky, recreate Reddit’s tone and structure on brand-owned channels: spaces that feel like genuine forums rather than polished content hubs.
• Monitor Reddit for what your consumers care about and build suitable and crawlable content within your own website and social platforms to intercept these searches and conversations.

On Reddit, engagement is easy to generate; goodwill isn’t.

Algorithmic Volatility & Staying One Step Ahead

There’s another twist to Reddit’s newfound importance: it’s already being manipulated and it’s already highlighted a key division amongst the AI power players.

Some marketers are experimenting with ways to influence Reddit visibility through exploiting upvotes, planting narratives, or feeding AI training datasets.

Predictably, search and AI platforms are catching on.

Brands should be aware that Reddit’s weight and authority in the AI algorithms is already frequently rebalancing. The same dynamic will play out again and again: once a platform becomes valuable, it becomes exploited by marketers – desperately chasing visibility, traffic and revenue – and its influence for AI models declines. This is where we as marketers need to stay one step ahead.

For brands, that means organic agility is now non-negotiable. In late 2025, in the space of a few weeks we saw one major platform further upweight Reddit’s importance (Gemini) while another (ChatGPT) down weighted it. This dual event keenly highlighted the raw pace at which organic marketers are now going to have to adjust their strategies in the new AI-driven world. At some stage the AI behemoths will undoubtedly land on their respective, preferred set of AI referral sources and a new map of digital alliances will emerge, but in the meantime, brands will have to stay nimble.

Whether it is Google, Reddit, or the plethora of social sites, brands cannot build organic strategy, directly or indirectly, on a single source of visibility any longer. Instead, they must track where authority lives right now and adapt quickly when the weighting shifts.

The next “Reddit” will appear soon enough, and the cycle will repeat. The goal isn’t to master one environment; it’s to build a marketing operating model that can evolve with them and balance where resource is focused as opportunity dictates. 

How Brand Teams Should Respond

So where does this leave marketers on the brand side?

First, accept that organic visibility now happens through interpretation, not indexing. AI systems are deciding which voices represent expertise and which sources define credibility. That means brand content strategies need to sound more human – and behave more like real conversation.

Second, embrace Reddit (and spaces like it) as early-warning systems. They’re messy and potentially uncomfortable, but they surface truths that don’t show up in polished analytics reports. Understanding what consumers say when they don’t think brands are listening will soon be as valuable as knowing your keyword rankings once were.

Third and finally, cultivate agility as a core skill within your organic teams. Marketing environments are becoming fluid, not fixed. The sources of trust, traffic, and truth are changing faster than the tools that track them, so brands that are braver in exploration of new spaces will reap the benefits.

Conclusions

Brands that win won’t just be the ones that rank; they’ll be the ones that resonate within environments where digital trust is being rebuilt from the ground up and that are fuelling the AI models.

Reddit is currently the preeminent entity in this new dynamic and the platform’s recent journey paints a picture of how this space is likely to evolve. Brands will have to become comfortable with monitoring where AI models are drawing data from and adjust their tactics accordingly. They will need one approach to Gemini visibility and another for ChatGPT for example.

The space is fragmented and moving like never before. Organic teams are going to match the pace of change to remain discoverable.