Reddit Marketing Statistics 2025: Brands Facing Reputation Risks & What to Do

Reddit is the 2nd visited-website in the United States, and a massive global community of real people discussing real problems (including problems with specific brands).

It’s also an official partner of both Google and OpenAI, providing them with training data.

Reddit enjoys incredible search visibility (both in organic results and through a dedicated “Discussion and forums” section of search).

What does all of that mean to businesses?

• Reddit is not a marketing channel to ignore
• Being discussed on Reddit means being part of LLM training data
• Reddit users may be discussing your brand now, and businesses have very little control over that
• Reddit threads discussing your businesses will likely rank for your branded search (and will directly impact your bottom line).

We surveyed 150 in-house marketing teams to understand how much businesses are impacted by Reddit, and if there’s anything they are doing about it. Here are some highlights from the Reddit marketing study:

Key Takeaways: Reddit Marketing Statistics

• The majority of the surveyed businesses (70%) consider Reddit a marketing priority
• Most of the surveyed businesses (73%) have Reddit threads ranking for their brand names in Google and most of these threads have negative sentiment towards their brands (63%)
• Reddit threads are summarized by Google’s AI Mode posing a direct thread to brands’ reputation
• The vast majority of businesses (~88%) didn’t try Reddit marketing citing “not understanding how the platform works” as the main reason (~48%)

Reddit Marketing Statistics from in-House Marketing Teams

Reddit survey participants

Reddit marketing is widely misunderstood and, as a result, very few agencies attempt to provide Reddit marketing services. So for this survey, I tried to only reach out to in-house marketing teams, i.e. those who work for a single brand and are aware how Google Search changes are impacting the business.

Here’s who participated:

Business Sizes of Respondents’ Organizations:

• Enterprise (100+ employees): 43%
• Medium (up to 100 employees): 46%
• Small (1-10 employees): 11%

Most Popular Types of Participating Businesses (Excluding manually entered “Other” types)

• Services: 31%
• SaaS: 25%
• Ecommerce: 24%
• Publication: 6%

70% of businesses consider Reddit a marketing priority

This number aligns with the percentage of businesses directly impacted by high-ranking Reddit threads for branded searches:

73.3% of businesses have Reddit threads ranking on page 1 for their branded searches

Most of the times you search for something like “[brand name] reviews,” you’ll see Reddit threads discussing that business. In some cases, Reddit threads rank above the fold for the main “brand name” search.

According to Semrush, Reddit ranks for 1.8 MILLION queries containing “reviews”:

63.2% of those Reddit threads ranking for branded searches are NEGATIVE towards the discussed brand

Only 9% of businesses reported positive threads showing up for their branded searches. The overwhelming majority of brand-focused threads is reported to be negative, and 27% of businesses said there was a good mix of positive and negative sentiment in ranking threads.

This is understandable and well-predictable: Happy customers rarely go above and beyond to share their great experience online. Unhappy customers are much more likely to go into trouble of publicly discussing brands. Besides, Reddit is widely known for its negativity.

Brand-focused discussions tend to be overwhelmingly negative, with people who have never even dealt with that brand willing to share their opinion. This is supported by Semrush data: Reddit URLs containing “scam” rank for 443.9K organic search queries in Google:

How many potential consumers will even try to research further when they immediately see something like this when researching a brand:

71.4% of Reddit sections in organic search include old threads

This means negative Reddit mentions can haunt you for years:

In most cases, it is not a single Reddit URL ranking in Google. It is often 3-4 threads appearing within one dedicated section (or even two sections). Here’s an example of both sections ranking on page #1 for a branded search query, resulting in 4 separate threads:

In most cases, there’s a good mix of fresh and old threads showing up within both sections:

• 71% of businesses see a good mix
• ~24% of businesses see threads that are years old

Most businesses are not seeing Reddit threads listed in AI Overviews (But they ARE present in the AI Mode)

The survey was started a few weeks prior to this article, and AI Overviews are highly dynamic, so this has likely changed. I wasn’t able to replicate any of the shared searches to even trigger AI Overviews. But I did run quite a few of those branded searches in Google’s AI Mode and found most of the results do include Reddit as the summarization sources.

This poses a huge risk to businesses: as AI Mode is being introduced to more and more countries and becoming better adopted by consumers, there will be little control over those brand-focused AI answers. Brands need to take action now.

Reddit is increasingly referenced and summarized in answers by other AI platforms, including Gemini, Perplexity and recently ChatGPT. Reddit citations are actually exploding in ChatGPT. The OpenAI and Reddit partnership is absolutely taking hold: Reddit citations in ChatGPT answers jumped 436% starting on May 19th (source: Josh Blyskal on Linkedin):

87.5% of businesses never tried any form of Reddit marketing

Despite the high percentage of businesses perceiving Reddit as a marketing priority, almost 90% of them have never tried marketing on Reddit:

47.8% of businesses cite “not understanding Reddit well enough” as the main reason for not marketing on Reddit

This is understandable because Reddit is not one channel: It’s thousands of subreddits, all with different rules and accepted styles of communication.

Other popular reasons for not marketing on Reddit include:

• “Worried about getting banned”: 39%
• “Worried about getting negative feedback or damaging reputation”: 26%
• “It’s too time-consuming”: 17%
• “Don’t see the value in it”: 17%

How Should Businesses Approach Reddit Marketing?

First things first: Let’s start with what businesses definitely should NOT be doing:

• DO NOT hire freelancers or agencies that promise shortcuts, i.e. to reply to old threads defending your brand using fake “customer” profiles. This will likely backfire and make your problem even worse. Not only will these posts likely be deleted by moderators, it could cause even more negativity and visibility for those old reputation-ruining threads. Reddit reputation management should be approached with great care.
• DO NOT wait until a problem happens. Being proactive is key. Even if you don’t have negative mentions on Reddit yet, a negative customer experience or any of your marketing moves can trigger a Reddit catastrophe at any time. I’ve seen lots of brands with the same exact problem: “We launched an Instagram advertising campaign, and now people are rushing to Reddit to discuss our brand.” If you are being proactive with Reddit community building, by the time any problem occurs, you will have pretty established official accounts that can step up to reply to negative comments and show the community who you really are as a business.

Being PRO-ACTIVE with Reddit marketing means fixing issues faster and more efficiently.

For most businesses, Reddit marketing is a necessary investment as they are already losing conversions due to high-ranking negative threads that are ranking for their branded searches.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Register an official brand account now to build up some positive history.
• Consider setting up a branded subreddit (especially if you already have issues). Official subreddits can help replace third-party negative threads you cannot control.
• Work with your customer support and sales teams to understand possible issues people may discuss (or are already discussing) on Reddit to know what needs to fixing or what needs to be better explained on your website.
• Develop an official response to negative comments. Don’t take this step lightly, as your official statements should be factual and neutral. Avoid being defensive or aggressive.
• Develop a quality assurance system for your team to brainstorm and confirm any official comments before making them public.
• Talk to an experienced Reddit marketing team. We’ve been on Reddit for more than 12 years. We know exactly what to expect, what types of comments should be avoided, and have a deep understanding of how to successfully interact with this unique community. We have well-developed mechanisms to balance your reputation on Reddit without resorting to fake reviews and shortcuts.

Seeing a Bigger Picture

Reddit is where most buying decisions are made (That’s why just about any brand name is searched on Reddit whether in Google or through native search). Its data is also being utilized by AI for training, and we are already seeing AI making buying decisions on customers’ behalf.

Whether Reddit will maintain their incredible rankings in the Google SERPs or not, it’s not a marketing channel to ignore. And yet, according to these Reddit marketing stats, the vast majority of businesses don’t know how to approach Reddit marketing, or haven’t even tried. Schedule a free call with Smarty.Marketing to let us show you how Reddit can be turned into your competitive marketing advantage.