Welcome to the first edition of Visible!

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Every week, I'll share data-driven insights to help B2B marketers get their brands recommended by AI. And sometimes I’ll share interesting Contender product updates.

Today I’m diving into whether you should care about getting your brand mentioned on Reddit.

I’ve seen a number of claims that conclude Reddit is so important to AI search optimization because it’s one of the most-cited websites by AIs like ChatGPT. (Citations are the URLs that ChatGPT references as “sources” when it formulates responses).

At first blush, this makes sense since (1) Reddit tends to rank really well on Google, which many LLMs rely on, (2) Reddit is chock-full of rich, first-person insights on a variety of topics, and (3) OpenAI and Reddit have a business partnership.

Plus, it’s a compelling claim. Anyone can post to Reddit, so if Reddit has disproportionate influence over ChatGPT’s recommendations, shouldn't everyone be doing it, like, right away?

But these claims have been generalized (not studied specifically for B2B), and, frankly, they’re based on shallow data. (“Look, ChatGPT cites Reddit all the time!” isn’t a particularly good insight without putting those citations in context.)

So let’s take a proper look, using a big data set focused on B2B software.

Tl;dr:

At Contender, we’ve built a database of 86,572 AI prompts. Every one of those “solution aware” prompts asks for a B2B software recommendation.

The prompts include things like “What's the best threat intelligence software?” and “Which AI software testing tool can help a Head of QA accelerate release cycles?”

Every month, we send our prompts to ChatGPT, and 99.92% of its responses recommend specific B2B brands.

That is, we have a lot of data about the responses from ChatGPT that B2B marketers should care a lot about.

For this study, we’ll look at our latest set of ChatGPT responses.

(Side note: I’ll have more non-ChatGPT insights in the future; we’re currently adding responses from other LLMs to the database.)

Let’s start by quantifying why some people get excited over Reddit.

First, in our data set, 24% of the ChatGPT responses that include URL citations include Reddit. That means 11% of all responses cite Reddit URLs.

Appearing in almost a quarter of URL citation sets is a substantial footprint!

In fact, reddit.com has more unique URLs cited by ChatGPT than any other domain in the database.

This is where most other studies have started and stopped. They see that Reddit gets more citations than other websites and conclude that it deserves special attention.

But here’s the thing.

Reddit might be #1 on that list, but it’s a very long list. There are many websites that have thousands of URLs getting cited.

When you add up all of the URLs getting cited, the URLs belonging to Reddit make up a tiny fraction of that pie. Looking at the responses across all B2B software categories:

So ChatGPT’s responses about the typical software category draw from ~294 different non-Reddit URLs but only ~4 Reddit URLs. That's a 73:1 ratio.

Even the outliers aren't that extreme: The software category with highest Reddit citation rate (prompt management tools software) has Reddit accounting for 10.4% of cited URLs (18 out of 173). So nearly 90% of unique URLs are from other sources.

It’s clear that B2B brands don't need to be on Reddit to get cited — there are hundreds of other URLs in play in the typical software category.

Here’s the other big issue with Reddit:

Reddit conversations are so nuanced and diverse that there's rarely a single authoritative Reddit thread for a software category.

So if ChatGPT is looking for information on Hubspot, for example, there are literally hundreds of Reddit posts it can choose from every time it does a search. In subsequent searches, each of those URLs gets re-cited by ChatGPT very few times relative to other websites.

On Wikipedia, on the other hand, there’s a single, authoritative page about Hubspot, so ChatGPT will keep coming back to that URL when questions come up about Hubspot.

You can see this in the data. (Keep in mind that we give ChatGPT ~49 different prompts, on average, about each of the 1,775 software categories we cover in the database.)

On average, non-Reddit URLs get re-cited by ChatGPT ~75% more often than Reddit URLs.

In fact, none of the top 814 most-cited URLs in the entire database are from Reddit. The most-cited Reddit URL ranks #815 overall.

This is part of the reason why Reddit is consistently the “most-cited” website when you only count the number of unique URLs from each website getting cited. Other websites consolidate information on a given topic into a much smaller number of URLs

This is the implication for your GEO/AEO strategy:

Even if you manage to get your brand mentioned in a Reddit thread without getting downvoted into oblivion or having your post removed by subreddit mods, you’re not going to get much mileage out of that mention.

If ChatGPT ends up referencing that thread, it’s probably not going to do so repeatedly (at least not at any rate close to what it does for other websites). And the highest ROI brand mentions you can get are in content that ChatGPT will keep coming back to.

To get your B2B brand recommended by ChatGPT, one powerful lever is to get your brand mentioned in the specific content that ChatGPT tends to cite the most often.

And that content doesn’t tend to be on Reddit.

Our data shows B2B marketers will get far better ROI from getting brand mentions on Wikipedia, industry review sites, or one of the many other non-Reddit sources that ChatGPT repeatedly cites.

The key is to know what the most-cited sources are for your specific product category so you can plan accordingly.

Yes, sometimes a URL from Reddit could be a good target because it’s among the most-cited URLs for your industry. But you won’t know that without good, comprehensive data.

The point is to make data-driven decisions so you can know which URLs — Reddit or not — are worth your attention. Otherwise, Reddit isn’t worth any special consideration.*

* Sure, Reddit content could influence LLM training data, but it’s just ask likely any of the many other authoritative websites in your industry could, too. And you face the exact same challenges I mentioned above, like each Reddit URL providing low ROI relative to relevant pages on other websites. Again, Reddit isn’t worth special consideration.

I’ve got this big (and growing) data set just waiting to be explored. What are some of the questions or suspicions you have that I can test?

Also, feel free to reply with any questions or feedback about this Reddit study. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,

Mike