← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Reddit vs. Google: The Future of AI Search
00:26:11
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- [00:00]
A
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:44]
B
86% of AI citations come from sources brands already control. So how do you navigate a community like Reddit when it's top of mind in AI responses? While all of us are optimizing product pages and blog posts, Reddit is beating traditional SEO out of the game of rankings in Google. Worse, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are pulling those same Reddit threads into their answers. That means your brand reputation is being shaped by Redditors and not your marketing team. With Google paying $60 million to license Reddit data and Sam Altman holding 9% stake in Reddit stock, this isn't a fluke. Reddit is becoming the AI training ground for discovery. I'm Jordan Cooney, and today I'm talking with Danny Kirk, founder at Ready Reach. His agency has helped 500 brands grow on Reddit ethically and at scale, and he understands how to turn Reddit from a liability into an AI search advantage. Danny, welcome to the Voice of the Search Podcast.
- [01:52]
C
Jordan, thanks for having me on.
- [01:53]
B
Yeah, super excited to have you join us. This is a hot topic right now, right? Everybody's talking about Reddit. It has become a mainstream marketing office conversation, right. And it's just all over the place in terms of its influence. And there's been a lot of data around this. And, you know, maybe before we dive into our first question, Danny, just give us a little history as to how you got into this business and, you know, a little bit background on Ready Reach.
- [02:22]
C
Yeah, for sure. So we're about nine years old now. I've kind of started and failed and learned many lessons from some startups over the past 15 years. And ready Reach was born out of all those lessons learned on growing other companies on a couple big ones I had had before. So kind of taking all those kind of growth tactics I had learned before because I never had investors or anything like that. If we had to, if we wanted money, we had to go raise it from our customers. So all those Lessons learned. Took that to an agency, and that's where we are nine years later, having helped over 500 brands grow and focusing on Reddit and AI search these days.
- [03:03]
B
Love it. Now, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned that you were a classically trained trumpet player, and you've got a whole history in music. How do you go from being a musician to building a $2 million Reddit marketing agency that serves over 500 brands?
- [03:22]
C
Yeah, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't in the cards, that's for sure. I come from a family of academics and musicians, all of which were very talented. And from a young age, like you said, I was a classically trained trumpet player, and my dad was a trumpet player and a trumpet professor, actually. So I started from a very young age, got very good at it, toured internationally, dropped out of high school because I was already accepted into conservatory, all that jazz. I'd like to say that I probably peaked in my early teens and then rode that wave down, but that was an incredible experience. But, you know, as I was getting through college and I did finish a degree in music, I saw that there was more to life than music. And one of those things that I did kind of just randomly stumble upon in college was entrepreneurship. So I was part of a fellowship, there's a scholarship, there was a bunch of entrepreneurs, had no idea what that meant, but kind of learned a little bit there. And then me and a buddy stumbled into a startup weekend about 15 years ago and naively started a SaaS company, found a good niche, ended up growing that for about five years. So it was a lot of pulling interesting threads, as I like to say.
- [04:43]
B
And when it comes to ready reach and like, and like, starting to build this entire business, how did you, like, even stumble upon Reddit? Like, how did you first get to realize this is a community I want to be invested in?
- [04:56]
C
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I've been using Reddit for probably about a decade now. I think most people's trajectory is, you know, for the first several years, you're just a lurker. Maybe you don't even make an account. You just haven't have the app or gone. They didn't even have the app back then. I don't think. Just go on their website and just kind of lurk and don't comment, don't upvote. But then I started to engage more and more, and for me personally, it's like a source of truth on many matters. Lots of hobbies and business. If I'm looking for product Reviews if I'm traveling someplace, all that jazz. So it was really just from a personal standpoint and then of course we were serving clients and as we saw this AI wave start and seeing that Reddit was the largest single source of training data that was kind of pretty easily influenced, it was a no brainer to put it on our services at our agency and then really double down on it. So that was kind of how we got to where we are today.
- [05:56]
B
Awesome. Any, any just like interesting success stories or unique opportunities that you've just like had the up, like the chance to work on and, and, and were able to influence through the, the Reddit community?
- [06:08]
C
Yeah, for sure. We did have a protein bar brand in the past couple months and so they're, you know, seven figure brand, their competitor is a nine figure behemoth and that behemoth had just sold a ten figure protein bar brand. So let's just say that they had resources and connections and everything, but you know, they weren't doing much on Reddit or weren't doing much on AI search. So we were able to kind of fight for the underdog in that case and really kind of put their name out there. They had a really great niche going after certain communities which Reddit is fantastic for. It's not just like what's the best protein bar, it's what's the, what's the best protein bar for these two issues or for the X, Y and Z. So really kind of dialing in on that in an incredibly organic way and then getting picked up by AI search as well. But things like that. I love fighting for the underdog. As a entrepreneur that's never had very many resources, I always love helping others like that.
- [07:08]
B
Love that, love that. So, you know, recently in the news we've read a lot about like citations and how Reddit citations are so important. But what we've been noticing is that there's been a drop in Reddit citations. Right. Like that there were many of these studies that were kind of saying that it's like 80% of the market or 80% of citations in ChatGPT were coming from Reddit. That's dropped down like 20 or 30%. I know that you're still bullish on Reddit. I mean that's the core ethos of your, of your agency and business. But, but like walk me through the human incentives or the enterprise marketing incentives that teams are missing as they think about this drop from 80 to 30% of citations.
- [07:49]
C
Yep. So you're absolutely right. It was like 80 actually I think some charts I'd seen said 90%. Let's just all acknowledge that that's way too high. There should not be a Single source that's 90%. And I was actually talking to another, a very well known founder yesterday. I was mountain biking with him and he was saying, honestly, 20% seems too too for a single source. Like so I think everyone's like freaking out. Is it dead? It's like no, 20% is still like really large and probably even too large. So just kind of putting it all into perspective. When you look at sources of any data, 20% is quite a bit. But you're right, it did drop from 80% down to 20% on average. And that's an average as far as kind of those incentives go. So there's, yeah, the big partnerships out there, the one that you mentioned with Google, $60 million a year. OpenAI has a partners with their API as well. And Reddit gets AI tools powered by OpenAI. Sam Altman owns a good amount of Reddit stock. There's a bunch of other partnerships as well. But I'm a big believer in human incentives. So what is Reddit selling? They're selling human data. They don't want bots, they don't want trolls, they don't want bad actors. They're trying to give good human data because what do the big LLMs want? They want that human data and they're not going to pay 60 million a year if it's bad data, if it's fake data, if it's just bots talking to bots. So those are the kind of incentives in there which I think keep good actors winning and bad actors downvoted into oblivion, which I'm honestly pretty okay with.
- [09:28]
B
So like, I mean you just brought up, and I know I mentioned this earlier, this, the $60 million investment, I think it's an annual investment, if I'm not mistaken. I think there's a bunch of other companies that are partnering with Reddit in this real financial. We're gonna pay you to access this human conversation that's happening. I wanna get your perspective. Why is that financial hook and Sam Altman's investment stake here propping up Reddit so prominently in all of these discovery platforms that there's some ad revenue that's coming back. Is there some hope that humanity is going to get better through this thing? Give me your perspective on why these financial incentives are so tied to the key founders and businesses that are also dependent on this to surface the content on their sites?
- [10:23]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So Reddit has been famously unprofitable for its entire existence. Thank goodness for LLM scraping their data because they might not have been around today. So this is fine. Finally a business model that is working for them much better than before. And then yeah, yet again. What do those LLMs need? They just feed off of data. They need more and more data. They also need up to date information. So imagine this, new products come onto the market all the time, new categories of products, things like that. If somebody types in, hey, what are the best mid sized trucks for 2026? What if they didn't have any data on what people think about the best mid sized trucks for 2026? Because you know, they didn't weren't using a platform like Reddit to get that human discussion. Where else would they get that data? You can't get it directly from the website, that's too biased. And yeah they do continually. It's not just like scrape this data once, but they need more and more data because they're training off of it. And also just products and services change over times and they need the most recent human data on that time for.
- [11:34]
D
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- [13:02]
B
Yeah, I think there's a huge value in the in that narrative. Around the core benefit of understanding how perception is changing. Right? And perception is changing really fast in Reddit and. But perception is changing really fast in the market. So it almost becomes like this temperature gauge of what is actually happening in terms of humanity's expectations from a product or service or experience to then the digital expectation of receiving information from that. So there's this crazy link there for sure. And unpacking it in LLMs, I think has never been more efficient than before. Right. Because a Google result showing up and then you clicking on the Google result to get to what you want is very frictioned experience. As you look at this and you look at this shift, this paradigm shift, most enterprises think that Reddit is a reputation risk. But you've said, and I've heard you say this in other conversations, that you actually think this is more reliable and more effective than traditional paid advertising. Tell me why.
- [14:08]
C
Yeah, for sure. I think that there are two different aspects of that. So the reputation side of things and then the argument of organic versus paid. So on the reputation side of things, I think one of the greatest features of Reddit is the upvote and the down vote. It is the law of the crowd. So everyone gets to say, like, is this good, is this bad? They don't always get it right. But just like when you go to the state fair and everyone gets to guess the bull's weight, one person says one pound and somebody says a million pounds, but you average it all out and it's actually right on the money. I think that's how Reddit works as well. You pile all this data together and you look at the crowd's voice and it's actually pretty accurate. So I think that is great for reputation because it enforces good actors winning yet again, the people that go in. So we may talk about this in a minute, but I consider us. We were told that we're the first non sketchy marketers. I spoke with somebody, I mean, arguably.
- [15:11]
B
Danny, you might be the first marketer, period.
- [15:17]
C
I don't think I'm the first not sketchy marketer in general, but first not sketchy Reddit marketer. So we try to do a really great job. We care about our brands, we follow the rules, we don't say untrue things. We don't make fake testimonials or reviews. We don't claim product use if there is no product use. We do a really great job at what we're focusing on because of reputation. As Warren Buffett says, it takes a lifetime of the build and 10 minutes to go away. So we take, we serve up to 10 figure brands right now, big names, and we take that really seriously. So we go on there and focus on incredible content creation, genuine interactions, all that jazz. And that helps from a reputational perspective. So we're good actors on there. Our stuff gets upvoted, it gets scraped by AI. So I think that is huge for reputation. A lot of people are scared of it because they've only heard the downside of Reddit. In all honesty, that only happens to bad actors. Like if you've done something bad, you might deserve it on Reddit, you know, because like yet again, everyone's in consensus, you know, they're not colluding, they're just in consensus.
- [16:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, one question off of that, like, how do you create that like kind of tribal or like community momentum? If something is working, how is it that ready reach is able to kind of get the momentum moving in that direction? What is it that you guys do and how do you guys craft that for the brands you represent?
- [16:45]
C
Yeah, we really focus on incredible commenting, so focusing, trying to find relevant posts for our clients. You know, post actually asking about solutions for problems somebody has or this brand versus that brand and then really trying to add value. Our number one goal is to help the reader. It's not to mention our client's brand even. It's first and foremost to help the reader. So we go in there, genuine, helpful, factually accurate and truthful comments that try to help the reader and then mention our client's brand as part of that. And then we just let that snowball over time. You're not going in there doing a bunch all at once, you're trickling it out. It's very similar to SEO. It's a long tailed approach and then you're just snowballed over time and it just builds and builds and builds. That reputation increases and then AI is continually scraping that information as well.
- [17:38]
B
So when it comes to leveraging Reddit as a brand and kind of gaining this momentum, are there certain brands where this makes a ton of sense? And there are some brands that maybe should just completely stay away from Reddit?
- [17:52]
C
Yeah, I think that the ones that are truly kind of fish in the barrel are not geospecific ones. So TAM could be the entire world or geographically the entire world or maybe an entire continent or all English speaking countries, a large TAM otherwise. So like maybe a mattress company or something like that, or a software company. Most e commerce brands fall into this and then after that having a really great and Kind of weird niche yet again, the protein bar for X, Y and Z, it's not just best protein bar, it's protein bar for this niche community. You know, that is really great. So usually they might have three to five really good subreddits that are highly targeted for them. So those ones work really well. And then the inverse of that doesn't work really well. Small tam, geographically centralized. So like when a mom and pop store, brick and mortar from a small town says they want to do this, there's just not enough surface area to make that work. On Reddit in my opinion. I mean it could, but relative to the large e commerce companies, those are the ones that really need to pay attention. And then final point of that, the reason why those e commerce companies should pay attention is because the buy it now button, you know, ChatGPT released this, what was it, three weeks ago now. And if that doesn't scare e commerce companies into action, I don't know what is. Because imagine this. Your future customer is never going to your website. Yeah, they're not googling anymore. Your website doesn't matter. Your ads don't matter. All they did was they typed in something into ChatGPT. It gave three recommendations based on the information it scraped, whether that's good or bad information. And then there's a buy it now button next to each three of those and they just click buy and then the transaction is there. So that I, you know, that is, we are in the early days of that but it's something that all e commerce brands need to get a part of.
- [19:54]
B
Yeah, love that. And I mean let's keep going in this, in this direction. There's a lot of value in understanding how enterprises or marketing teams should be thinking about Reddit content influencing and specifically that this Reddit content influencing then connects to a brand influence or brand sentiment that then shows up in these AI responses. Tell us about this connection between how the content that is in Reddit then becomes a key brand sentiment lever that then all of a sudden is part of the responses that show up all over Google and ChatGPT and the like.
- [20:38]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I try to be yet again back to the good marketer. I don't work for an LLM. LLMs are the biggest black box of all time. I have no idea what goes on side inside their heads and it changes every day. Big disclaimer there any anybody that claims like oh I understand the algorithm, I'm like oh very, tell me more. So from what we see, and that can change over time. First and foremost, a lot of these LLMs and Google have already scraped a ton of information so you can go on and just reverse engineer all this. We're going to talk about AI search Intel tools in a bit, but you could just go onto Google, type in best X for Y Reddit, and it'll show you all the top Google rated links. You could then ask ChatGPT or your favorite LLM outside of Grok, because Groq's mainly using Twitter or, you know, it's a different source of data, but you can just ask, hey, hey, what's the best X for Y? And can you just cite Reddit links only? So then you can just essentially see all those links and see what people are kind of involved with, what types of discussions, how your, how those brands are mentioned in that, and just kind of reverse engineer the process. So that's a great way to do it. And then of course there's some more technical things with like AI search tools and whatnot, but that's something, what I just mentioned is something anybody can do really quickly.
- [21:59]
B
And when the sentiment gets negative, you know, let's talk about that, right? When things aren't positive, what are the main drivers to improving that conversation and avoiding the death of your conversion rates because the sentiment is negative about your brand?
- [22:16]
C
Yeah, so we have this question quite a bit. I get a lot of inbound and people are like, oh, Reddit hates us and whatnot. And I'm like, all right, tell me more. And it's usually just a single post that they then say that is the entire sentiment of Reddit hating denim. Like, guys, it's just a single post. You know, this stuff happens, you know, especially with really big brands, like you have 50,000 customers. How could one not have a bad experience and then maybe go make a comment on our post on Reddit? We have a rule out our company and most Redditors follow this as well. You never feed a troll on Reddit. So we actually just do not engage with any super negative posts or anything like that on Reddit. There is only downside in that. So if you think it was bad before going in there and trying to be like, hey, we're not actually bad. No, all those people that were hating on you before will come attack you on that comment. So that is not the strategy to follow. That's not going to help. That's going to make it worse. So it's really trying your best and I know it's hard to ignore that one or small handful of negative interactions on there and just really focus on adding value and being helpful in ones that are virgin territory and just, you know, yet again, people asking for a solution that you solve for or like a comparison of a product, just being really helpful and beneficial in those areas and just do your best to ignore.
- [23:42]
B
Those other ones 100%. And in this, in this same direction here. Right, because the other challenge that a lot of brands have is how do I now manage my own world within rest it. Right. So when you have your own branded section, there's a lot of, you know, excitement to be proactive in the community as a brand and thinking that that's going to shape the AI outcomes or perceptions tell us how brands should be managing that expectation and going forward. As a brand representative inside of Reddit.
- [24:15]
C
Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different ways to do it, but for branded accounts, you know, like I was looking at with an agency owner the other day, like Nike's branded, you know, big brands like that, I really love the approach of just being like a branded customer service representative. That doesn't mean you need to name the account customer service with X, Y and Z, but just being out there and being helpful, like if you see somebody that had a question about your shoe company going in there and being like, hey, here's the FAQ to our website, you know, if you have any questions, shoot me a dm. You know, just being like the happy, the happy helper on there, the guardian angel of your brand. Not being salesy, not being pushy, just answering questions and trying to be helpful yet again. It's just imagine if people didn't use your customer service line and they just posted questions to Reddit, act like that is your customer service line and then just go in there and be helpful to them.
- [25:13]
B
So one of the interesting pieces that we've been unpacking recently is the shift, right? We started this segment with the shift from, you know, 80ish percent down to 30% of Reddit being part of the citations. And if you think about traditional Google, Wikipedia was the kind of the first pioneer resource of data that powered the knowledge graph and then kind of became this de facto source of truth when it came to validating a lot of data points or information that is on the web. As you think about Reddit, do you see that Reddit's dominance is going to continue to stay as prevalent? And do you feel like there's any history that might repeat itself between Reddit, Wikipedia and how these are used as reference points on the Internet?
- [26:04]
C
I imagine its dominance being relatively steady. So then it's like a question of two different options there. What other platforms would that are currently around and have large traction would take its place? Of course Twitter is a great source for Grok, in all likelihood owned by the same person. But what would take Reddit? Wikipedia is huge. Wicked YouTube as well, different types of things but it's like still content that could be absorbed. Wikipedia is kind of a static thing though. So Reddit is always changing and moving and sentiment about brands, whereas Wikipedia is more like historical information. These are the facts you know, versus Reddit is like the voice of the crowd. So I imagine Reddit's dominance stays relatively strong. Then the other option is another platform that is doesn't yet exist, comes out and gets 100 million users. That's harder to do, but could happen. But I personally think Reddit will remain dominant, or at least a large portion of trained data for the foreseeable future.
- [27:12]
B
Awesome. And that's a wrap of this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thank you to Danny Kirk, founder of Ready Reach, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Danny, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on voicesofsearch.com you can also visit his company website, readyreach.com if you haven't subscribed yet and would like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed each week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.