Recently, when I was searching for a new coffee shop in Manila, I did a quick search in ChatGPT and Google. Something about the results piqued my curiosity.
Do you see what I see? 👀
What’s common between these two results is:
Reddit used to be a ‘niche for nerds’. Since the pandemic, it has gained mainstream popularity. Improvements in UX and focus on quality moderation have led to its massive growth.
Backlinko offers some insightful analysis on Reddit's users and growth stats:
Two interesting trends have emerged recently:
💥 Reddit is now the most widely cited source across all LLMs. Looking for an authentic discussion on any topic? Reddit is the place to be. Its context-rich, natural-language driven content is gold for LLMs.
💥 Reddit now shows up 97.5% of the time in Google Search product review queries and accounts for nearly two-thirds of the slots reserved for Google’s Discussions and forums SERP feature. This is because Google now has access to Reddit’s Data API, and its 2024 core updates prioritize ‘helpful content’.
🏅Unquestionably, Reddit is in a prime position in the AI economy;
⚒️ But it is also a massively underutilized marketing channel!
Advertising on Reddit is still not as saturated as its sizable addressable market:
Reddit has 110.4 million Daily Active Unique Users in Q2 2025, capturing 7.8% of time spent per day
It only captures 0.4% of global social media ad spend [Meta + Google > 50%]
Its CPMs are lower than those of larger social platforms
But the jury is still out on how effective Reddit ads are, as success heavily depends on community relevance.
I believe it is much more effective to use Reddit for the following marketing activities:
👀 Market Research & Problem Discovery
Reddit's tagline is ‘heart of the internet’ because nowhere else can you get honest but moderated opinions on virtually any topic.
Tools such as upvotes, comments, and awards are used to gauge the popularity of a particular subject.
For example, questions on /r/AskReddit often receive thousands of answers from people across different ages, geographies, and interests.
🎁 Essentially, it is a massive, free focus group that you can utilize for market research to understand user behaviors with questions such as:
“What’s the most frustrating part about grocery shopping?”
“What’s something you wish your bank app did automatically?”
🪢 Early Validation & MVP Feedback
There are many niche subreddits where you can share what you are working on and get brutally honest feedback early in your journey. For example, subreddits such as /r/SideProject, /r/indiehackers, and/r/UIUX are great for posting prototypes or asking questions about general business viability.
🎁 Niche communities = hyper-specific user groups. Anonimity = honesty
These interactions can give you early signals of Product-Market fit when you hear things like:
“Can you add me to the beta?”
“I’d pay for this if it had X.”
🌱 Community-Led Growth
This is challenging, and it may require consistent engagement in subreddits where you have to show up to answer questions without overtly promoting yourself.
🎁 Notion is the best B2C example of how to utilize Reddit communities, such as/r/productivity, /r/Notion, /r/college, and /r/startups, to nurture power users, spotlighting community creations and even hiring from the community
🎁 1Password is a great B2B example that has masterfully created a Reddit community for identifying product feature requests, marketing their new updates, and turning the Reddit community into evangelists.
Early Stage Start-up? Do this 👉
🎯 Use a keyword tool to discover how Reddit results are ranking for your branded and non-branded terms. This will show you where there are opportunities to develop “helpful content” at all stages of the customer journey.
🗣 Find a relevant subreddit that contains your ideal customer and is large enough (>50K members). Build karma by commenting on relevant posts that mention problems, questions, and competitors in your space.
🖋️ Test different types of content, such as a) the relatable post, b) the guide post, c) the conversation starter, and d) the story post.
❌ Redditors hate blatant self-promotion. No direct links and corporate BS. So frame it as “here’s a problem I faced → here’s what I tried → curious if others struggle too?”
😀 TLDR:
Reddit is at a sweet spot between SEO and GEO: Google promotes Reddit at the top of the SERP for many long-tail search terms. LLMs are trained on Reddit data and cite it as a source for most queries.
Still at a nascent stage in monetization relative to its TAM, hence it’s an underutilised source for marketers.
The best way early-stage startups could use Reddit is for a) market research, b) validating MVP features, and c) nurturing their communities for insights.