Reddit / AI citations

Reddit just became even more important for businesses. Reddit was already dominating Google search results and having an outsized return on AI responses, but now Google is experimenting with showing Reddit comments directly in the AI response as well as on Google Business Profiles.

So I just want to talk about how you can take advantage of this trend towards Reddit without spending hours every day on the platform. The thing to understand is that Google and AI aren't looking at all of Reddit based on your industry.

There's going to be a handful of subreddits to get cited often. Then even within those subjects, it's probably only 1 or 2% of threads that are actually getting cited.

What you'll notice when you start tracking which threads are actually getting cited is that it's just a handful that are getting most of the citations. So instead of spending hours posting comments on every relevant thread in Reddit, you can just identify the top 20 to 50 cited threads on Reddit and post comments there.

Most of these top cited Reddit threads are at least a year old...

irst just be a normal person on Reddit. And then when you draft the comment, just be genuinely helpful.

Provide as much helpful information as you can. If you have an AI hooked up to a knowledge base about your brand and industry, they can help draft the comments for you.

Just make sure you have some guidance to make sure it doesn't sound like AI. This is what we do for about half of our clients.

And then of course, you need to explicitly mention your brand by name without upsetting the moderators. I think the easiest way to do this is just to be honest.

You can say something like full disclosure, I work for X y Z company. We provide X solution for Y demographic, so I have a lot of experience with this topic.

When you do it that way, it doesn't sound like a sales pitch. You're just explaining why you're qualified to speak on this specific topic.

If you wanna be found online in 2026, user generated content has never been more important. So I wanna talk about three platforms that I think you should be active on as a business.

The third one I'm not hearing anyone talk about right now. The first is YouTube.

Google is showing more and more YouTube videos on their search results pages and large language models love to cite YouTube far more than any other video site. Now doing YouTube well takes time and commitment, but there are a few easy ways that you can take advantage of YouTube.

One is just to target the same search terms that you would target with vlog posts. Most YouTubers are not focused on search terms because it's a small percentage of YouTube views that come from search.

There are likely hundreds of relevant search terms with no competition on YouTube and simply making a video with that term in the title will let you show up not just in YouTube search, but also on Google's main search results page. And more importantly, this is one of the easiest ways to influence the response from large language models...

The other platforms aren't cited nearly as often by large language models, but they can still rank in Google search results. We had one client who took up five positions on page 1 for one of his main search terms, his blog post, a YouTube video, two TikTok videos, and an Instagram post.

The second platform you should be paying attention to is Reddit. There's two ways I recommend using Reddit, and neither of them include creating a bunch of fake accounts and spamming.

If you enjoy using Reddit, just be an active member of relevant communities, post helpful comments, and when it makes sense, mention your brand without being overly promotional. Once you've earned some karma and learned the rules and the relevant subreddits, you can even make some of your own posts.

I think doing this is completely worth it for its own sake. You'll likely get customers directly from Reddit, but it's not the best use of your time if you're trying to affect the large language models response.

That's because large language models aren't reading every post on Reddit...

Facebook groups. I don't know why no one's talking about this.

I think that they're probably not actually tracking in large language model responses. In my experience, at least for business related prompts, Facebook groups cited almost as often as Reddit and some industries cited more often.

Now we don't post to Facebook groups on behalf of our clients. So I don't have as much experience there.

But my advice would be similar to that of Reddit. Make sure to mention your brand and what it does explicitly and try not to piss off the group you're posting in.

This is Ben AI Search Factor No. 11 from Kevin Indigs Growth Memo Newsletter.

This ends the 11 part series. I recommend going back and watching number one.

If you've been following GEO advice at all, you've probably heard that large language models love fresh content. You need to update your content constantly, so ChatGPT will cite it.

And there is some truth to this, but it's much more nuanced than people typically present it. You may have heard stats like 70% of the content that ChatGPT sites was updated in the last 12 months.

And that is true, but just consider that most of the content people are interested in has probably been updated in the last 12 months. I think it's also important to consider that 30% of all the content ChatGPT sites has not been updated at all in the last year.

Also, how does a large language model know that content is fresh? Let's talk about that and when you should actually care.

My friend Dave Davies recently shared something really interesting in Marie Haynes search bar. By inspecting the page source code while using ChatGPT.

He found that ChatGPT actually passes a relevancy parameter to the web tool whenever it performs a search...