A smarter way to approach Reddit in PR
There’s a visibility gap many brands are currently sitting in.
Kate Dmytrenko is senior PR director at The Colab.
Reddit turns 21 this year. PR professionals have, understandably, treated it as a minefield to avoid. Reddit communities are notoriously allergic to obvious marketing plays. But something has changed that ups the opportunity on the platform: AI has made it a primary source.
According to research from Search Engine Land, Reddit has become one of the most cited sources in AI-generated responses, particularly for Q&A and comparison-based queries. Google signed a $60 million annual licensing deal for access to Reddit’s content in 2024. When someone asks ChatGPT a question about your client’s industry, the answer is increasingly drawn from Reddit threads. If your client doesn’t have a presence in those threads, they’re absent from the layer that’s shaping buying decisions before anyone clicks a link.
That’s a visibility gap many brands are currently sitting in.
Reddit is an earned media play, not a social media play
The mistake most brands make is approaching Reddit like a social channel: branded accounts, promotional content, scripted community management. Reddit communities see through it immediately.
The smarter frame is viewing Reddit as an earned media channel with an AI amplification layer. You’re not pitching a journalist. You’re building authentic presence in communities that AI systems trust and cite. Over time, your client’s expertise becomes part of what AI surfaces when someone asks a question in their space.
Start with an audit
You don’t have to go all in on a full-scale Reddit plan to get value. Search your client’s brand, key competitors and category terms. Identify which subreddits are active, read the threads and pay close attention to the language people use to describe their problems.
Those conversations often mirror what journalists covering that space are already investigating, which means Reddit can inform better pitches whether you’re actively participating or not. Manual searches work, but there are tools that monitor at scale if you need them.
Two plays: brand or human presence
Once you know where your client’s communities live, you have two participation options. The first is a branded account. This works in theory. u/KeithfromSonos became a case study in getting it right because the account was named after a real person and Keith actually showed up in threads to help. But most branded accounts are tolerated at best, trusted rarely. Reddit participants aren’t there to get sold to.
Executive and founder participation, when done right, outperforms brand accounts. Eric Hochberger, CEO of Mediavine, spent four hours in r/Blogging in September 2025 fielding hard questions about AI-driven traffic declines for independent publishers. He wasn’t there to announce anything. He was there because it was his community, and they all had questions. That kind of participation builds a layer of trust no press release can replicate, and it feeds the AI citation layer directly.
The criteria for exec participation are simple: genuine knowledge, a real stake in the community and the ability to say “I don’t know” out loud. A product engineer who built the thing Redditors care about will outperform a CEO there for the optics. Identify subreddits where your client’s expertise is relevant, not where their product is sold, and where the problem they solve is discussed. Have the exec engage in existing threads before running an AMA. Build karma before asking for attention.
One thing that’s non-negotiable: disclose. Reddit’s Content Policy requires transparency about commercial affiliation, and FTC guidelines apply here the same as anywhere else. “I work at [Company]” in the bio isn’t optional, and Reddit communities will find the affiliation anyway. Getting ahead of it is the difference between credibility and a thread titled “[Company] caught hiding their marketing.”
Before you pitch this to a client
It may be that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for a full-scale Reddit program. It’s a manual labor of love, and using it as an intelligence and auditing tool may be exactly enough for where your client is right now. There’s real value in just listening.
But if you want to go a step further, start by identifying the right human, not the right title. The best Reddit participant isn’t necessarily the CEO. It’s whoever has genuine expertise and can have an unscripted conversation. Monitor before you participate. Set up ongoing searches for your client and industry-affiliated keywords and competitors. You’re looking for which subreddits are active, which questions keep surfacing and whether your client’s name comes up, in what context.
The brands doing this well right now are doing GEO without calling it that. They’re showing up where the AI is learning. That’s earned media with compounding returns.
