Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude questions that used to go straight into Google. "Best CRM for small teams." "What's the best protein powder for runners." "How do I fix a leaky faucet."
The answers these models give back? They're increasingly pulled from Reddit.
This didn't happen by accident. Reddit signed a $60 million annual licensing deal with Google in 2024 for training data. OpenAI signed its own deal shortly after. Both companies wanted the same thing: structured access to what is probably the largest collection of real human opinions on the internet.
Why Reddit, specifically?
The licensing deals explain the access, but not the preference. When we've tested queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, Reddit content shows up disproportionately. A few reasons seem to drive this:
Reddit threads read like Q&A. Subreddits like r/personalfinance and r/technology are already structured as questions and answers. That maps neatly onto how LLMs generate responses.
Upvotes act as a quality signal. A comment with 200 upvotes in a relevant subreddit carries weight. A buried comment with zero engagement doesn't. The voting system gives models a built-in credibility filter that blog posts and marketing pages lack.
The content feels real. People on Reddit talk about products the way they actually experience them, warts included. "I love Notion but the mobile app makes me want to throw my phone" is more useful training data than a polished landing page.
It stays fresh. Active threads get updated with new comments. Static blog posts from 2021 don't.
When someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best project management tool for remote teams," the model doesn't guess. It draws on thousands of Reddit threads where actual users debated exactly that question.
How a Reddit comment becomes an AI citation
There's a pipeline here, and understanding it matters if you want your brand to show up.
Crawling. AI companies index Reddit continuously. Every public post and comment gets captured, along with metadata: upvotes, comment depth, subreddit, user karma.
Training and retrieval. Models learn (during training or at inference time via RAG) which content is worth surfacing. A well-upvoted comment in a focused subreddit beats a throwaway reply in a mega-thread.
Synthesis. When someone asks a question, the model identifies relevant threads, weighs the comments, and assembles an answer. Perplexity and ChatGPT with browsing sometimes cite Reddit explicitly. Other times the Reddit content just shapes the answer without attribution.
The trust gap. Here's what makes this interesting: people tend to trust an AI-generated answer more than a Google search result. If your brand shows up in that answer, you've basically gotten a personal recommendation from a machine that millions of people rely on.
What gets picked up vs. what gets ignored
Not everything on Reddit ends up in AI answers. We've noticed clear patterns in what surfaces:
Comments with detailed comparisons do well. "I tried Asana, Monday, and ClickUp for a 12-person team, here's what happened over 3 months" is catnip for AI models. Personal experience with specifics (numbers, timeframes, concrete outcomes) tends to appear frequently in generated answers.
Consensus matters too. When five different people in a thread independently recommend the same tool, models pick up on that signal and amplify it.
What doesn't work: anything that reads like an ad. Reddit users downvote marketing-speak, and models seem to deprioritize it accordingly. Low-engagement comments in dead threads have almost no influence. Heavily downvoted takes get excluded.
The gap most brands don't see
Here's a scenario we keep running into. Two SaaS companies compete in the same space. Company A has great SEO: strong blog, high domain authority, featured snippets. Company B has people on their team who regularly participate in relevant subreddit discussions, share honest comparisons, and help users troubleshoot.
Someone asks ChatGPT "best tool for [their use case]." Company B gets mentioned. Company A doesn't.
Company A doesn't have a worse product. They just don't have any Reddit presence for the AI to draw from. And this gap grows wider every month as more people default to AI assistants over search engines.
Getting your brand into AI answers
There's no hack for this. Models are good at filtering low-quality or manipulative content. What works is actually being useful in the places these models look.
Know where your category gets discussed. Which subreddits? What questions keep coming up? What do people ask when they're evaluating products like yours? Dabe tracks these conversations and alerts you while threads are still active.
Be helpful, not salesy. The comments that get cited are the ones that help someone make a decision. "I've been using [tool] for our 15-person remote team for 8 months. The async standups feature saved us about 3 hours/week, but the mobile app still needs work" beats "Our tool is the best!" every time.
Show up consistently. One good comment won't move the needle. Regular participation across relevant threads builds a pattern that models pick up on: your brand keeps appearing in conversations about your category.
Measure your share of voice. How often does your brand get mentioned versus competitors in relevant Reddit threads? That ratio maps directly to how often you'll appear in AI-generated answers.
Answer direct questions. "Has anyone tried [competitor]?" and "What's the best [category]?" threads are exactly what becomes AI training data. Being there with an honest, useful response is the highest-value thing you can do.
Where this is heading
More people are shifting from search to AI assistants every month. The brands that are present in the Reddit conversations these models train on will keep getting cited. The brands that aren't, won't.
Reddit conversations are becoming the new backlinks. If you want to show up in AI-generated answers, you need to be part of the discussions that feed them.
Want to see which Reddit conversations are driving AI citations in your category? Start monitoring with Dabe or book a free strategy call.