The rank tracker says your “best CRM for startups” page slipped overnight. You search the term logged out, and in the first organic slot, right under Google’s AI Overview, sits a Reddit thread titled “which crm for a startup.” All lowercase, two months old, more than fifty comments.
So you try the next term on your list, then the one after. On October 2, 2026, we ran twelve software buying searches through Google in the U.S. A Reddit thread was on page one for all twelve, and the first organic result for nine of them. The best-ranking landing page in your category may be a page you didn’t write and can’t edit.
Most Reddit SEO advice is written for the brand that wants to post. This is for the team losing a buying search to a thread. Empact Partners runs Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for B2B software companies, making a brand the one search results and AI answers name for its category, and these threads are part of that work. By the end, you’ll know:
Reddit ranks so high on Google for three reasons. Google has said publicly, again and again since 2022, that it wants first-hand discussion in its results. It pays for structured access to Reddit’s content. And a thread whose title matches a buyer’s search often answers it faster and more candidly than the vendor pages around it.
We Ran Twelve Software Buying Searches, And A Thread Ranked First In Nine
A Reddit thread held a place on page one for every software buying search we ran, and first organic place for nine of the twelve. We pulled Google’s first page for each on October 2, 2026 (U.S., English, desktop, via DataForSEO), then read all twenty-three threads from an archive copy, since Reddit blocks automated readers.
| Search | The highest-ranking thread | What the top answer did |
|---|---|---|
| best crm for startups | “which crm for a startup,” r/CRM. First organic, 2 months old. | Recommends Attio |
| best crm for small business | “Best Simple CRM for Small Businesses: Lightweight Alternative to Google Sheets,” r/CRMSoftware. First organic, 2 months old. | Recommends Pipedrive and Folk |
| hubspot vs salesforce | “Salesforce vs HubSpot,” r/salesforce. First organic, quoted in the AI Overview, 3 years old. | HubSpot is easier, Salesforce goes further |
| salesforce alternatives | “Alternatives to Salesforce,” r/salesforce. First organic, 2 weeks old. | Argues for staying on Salesforce |
| best project management software | “What project management tools do you guys recommend?” r/projectmanagement. Third organic, 18 months old. | Recommends Smartsheet |
| asana vs monday | “Asana vs Monday,” r/projectmanagement. First organic, 3 years old. | Recommends a third tool, Bonsai |
| best email marketing software | A small-business owner asking which email marketing tool works best, r/businessemail. First organic, 10 months old. | Recommends Omnisend |
| zendesk alternatives | “Best Zendesk Alternatives for Small Businesses in 2026,” r/issuetrak. First organic, 4 months old. | A listicle; no person recommends anything |
| best help desk software | “Help Desk Software Recommendations,” r/sysadmin. Third organic, with a 2016 thread at seventh, 3 years old. | Recommends Freshdesk |
| notion vs confluence | “Notion vs Confluence vs something else for small business trying to scale?” r/Notion. First organic, 2 years old. | Both are fine; prefers Notion |
| jira alternatives | “Alternatives to Jira? One that doesn’t look like Windows 3.11 and can still support engineering work (i.e. not Trello),” r/ProductManagement. First organic, 4.5 years old. | Tried two others, went back to Jira |
| best accounting software for small business | “Owners who run their own businesses, what bookkeeping software do you use, is there only Quickbooks, or there is something betrer (cheaper also)?” r/smallbusiness. Third organic, quoted in the AI Overview, 21 months old. | Still on desktop QuickBooks, to avoid a subscription |
Yes, the third-best page on Google for small business accounting software has “something betrer” in its title, and Google’s AI Overview quotes it anyway. Here is what the twenty-three threads have in common:
Twelve searches on one Friday is a small sample, drawn from the categories with the most marketing money in them, where you’d most expect a vendor page to win. From the losing side, Reddit SEO means understanding the threads that already rank for your buying terms and earning an honest place in the ones worth being in.
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Google Asked For This In Writing, And Reddit Told Investors It Worked
Google didn’t stumble into ranking Reddit. Its own blog asked for more forum content in results, four years running, and then Google paid for direct access to Reddit’s data. It left a paper trail.
| Date | What Google announced | What Google said | What followed for Reddit, on the record |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 18, 2022 | The helpful content update | It targets content “primarily created for ranking well in search engines” | No public data ties it to Reddit |
| September 28, 2022 | “Discussions and forums,” a results block for forum posts | “Helpful content from a variety of popular forums and online discussions” | A slot on the page reserved for threads, first on mobile in the U.S. |
| May 10, 2023 | The “Perspectives” filter and “hidden gems” | Helpful information can live in “a comment in a forum thread” | Reddit’s S-1: logged-out users were 75% of users added from July to December 2023 |
| November 15, 2023 | First-person ranking improvements | “A series of ranking improvements to show more first-person perspectives” | No public data; Google’s Search Liaison later said the hidden-gems change sat in its core ranking systems (reported by Search Engine Roundtable) |
| February 22, 2024 | Access to Reddit’s Data API | Reddit content to “display, train on, and otherwise use” | Reuters reported about $60 million a year; Google’s post names no price |
| May 6, 2026 | Discussion previews inside AI responses | “Perspectives from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources” | No public data yet; our own AI-answer counts are further down |
Two names need a plain definition. “Discussions and forums” is the block Google added in September 2022 that shows forum threads as their own set of results. “Hidden gems” is Google’s May 2023 phrase for useful answers in unexpected places, like “a comment in a forum thread.”
Reddit’s side of the story is in its own filings. Its S-1, filed the same day Google announced the data deal, says growth in its daily users at the end of 2023 came “primarily from product enhancements and third-party search engine and algorithm changes.” That’s a company telling the SEC, in writing, that search engines’ algorithms grew it.
What each side gets, and what you lose
The deal is good for both companies, and the bill lands on you:
The arrangement is more exclusive than it looks. On July 1, 2024, Reddit changed its robots file to shut out Bing and most other crawlers while Google, the engine with a deal, stayed in, which Microsoft confirmed to Search Engine Land that month.
The arrangement travels, too. Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive counted 4.5 million machine-translated Reddit pages ranking in Google France and 4.7 million in Germany in May 2026, so an English thread about your product may be answering German buyers before your German site does.
Lily Ray, one of the SEOs who has tracked this most closely, makes the uncomfortable version of the case in an April 2025 interview on Search Atlas’s YouTube channel. From about the twentieth minute, she argues that Google doesn’t treat Reddit like other sites, and dates the forum surge to July 2023.
Read The Thread As A Landing Page, And It Does Every Job Yours Was Built For
A ranking thread converts like a landing page because it has the parts of one, a headline in the buyer’s words, a problem, a value proposition, proof, and objections, written by people with nothing to sell. Take the first result for “hubspot vs salesforce,” a May 2023 thread in r/salesforce that Google quotes in its AI Overview.
Read it top to bottom the way you’d review your own landing page, and the thread covers every section:
| Landing page element | What the thread does instead |
|---|---|
| Headline | “Salesforce vs HubSpot.” Three words, the search itself, no adjective and no promise. |
| Hero and problem | An employee at a small company says leadership wants to move from Salesforce to HubSpot after HubSpot’s demos, and asks whether it comes with limitations. Stakes and doubt, in one short paragraph. |
| Value proposition | Thirty-eight minutes later, the first answer to name a product says HubSpot is easier to start on and Salesforce goes much further, and tells you which to buy if you have the budget. |
| Social proof | That answer had 119 upvotes in an archive copy three months on, three times the question’s 36, and the replies under it come from people who say they’ve worked with both. |
| Call to action | No button and no link. The “action” is a recommendation with conditions: Salesforce if you have the budget for licenses and technical staff. |
| Objection handling | The next answer pushes back on the premise, asks whether the company needs a true CRM at all, and lists what HubSpot can’t do. |
| Maintenance | None possible. Reddit had locked the thread against new comments and votes by March 2025, and it still ranks first in October 2026. |
In the thread’s own words, from three different people:
“The floor is higher with HubSpot, the ceiling is much much higher with Salesforce.” – r/salesforce, May 2023
“Does your org need it as a true CRM? Because HubSpot is not.” – r/salesforce, May 2023
“I just did a HubSpot to Salesforce migration.” – r/salesforce, May 2023
Now hold your own comparison page up against it. Its headline is a slogan, its hero is your product, its objections live in an FAQ nobody opens, and its social proof is a row of logos. The thread’s headline is the query, it opens on the buyer’s doubt, and its best line says who should buy which product.
The “floor-and-ceiling” line is the part worth stealing. It is a value proposition with its limit built in, and it’s more persuasive than either vendor’s homepage because it costs the writer nothing to say. Your page can say the same kind of thing about itself: who you’re for, who you’re not for, and what a customer who left you found missing.
The objection works the same way. A stranger asking whether the company needs a true CRM is doing the job a sales engineer does on a call, in public, and the buyer trusts it because nobody arranged it. If you know the question that kills your deals, put it on your own page with an honest answer before a thread puts it there without one.
The title is the lever we see move first. A specialty insurance brokerage came to Empact Partners after five Reddit posts drew nearly 100,000 views and no leads, and one failure we found was titles written for Reddit’s feed instead of Google. Rebuilt around what its buyers search, the program brought nearly 40 qualified leads in a single month.
The brokerage is one partnership, in a market where buyers phone in and name the thread that sent them, and what transfers is the order of the fixes. It is also why our Generative Engine Optimization work treats a thread as a search asset first, judged by whether it answers a buyer’s search and never by its upvotes.
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A Thread With A Straight Answer Keeps Ranking After Everyone Leaves
A good thread compounds like an evergreen page, because nothing in a straight answer goes stale the way a pricing table or a product screenshot does. Of the nine searches where a thread ranked first, four were held by threads more than two years old.
The oldest of them, the Jira thread, has no body text at all. The whole original post is its title, written in March 2022, and four and a half years of answers have kept it first for “jira alternatives.” Your own comparison page has probably been redesigned in that time.
The same durability shows up in AI answers. Our sister company, Qvery, records the answers ChatGPT and Google AI Mode give to software buying questions, and for sixteen software companies, it read 97,799 ChatGPT answers and 96,600 AI Mode answers from June to August 2026, then followed every URL first cited in March:
| Measure, June to August 2026 | Reddit threads | Companies’ own pages |
|---|---|---|
| Cited in ChatGPT answers to software buying questions | 22.8% | 17% |
| Cited in Google AI Mode answers to the same questions | 27.9% | 27.6% |
| First cited in March, still cited in August | 10.5% | 7.9% |
| Went quiet for a month and came back | 17.4% | 10.1% |
Qvery is ours, so weigh that, and check the base before trusting the gaps: the March cohort is 2,386 threads against 2,147 company pages, one window, one pair of engines. The last row is the counterpoint. Threads also vanish for a month and come back, and Reddit’s own second-quarter 2026 letter called its search referrals “choppy.”
Our own Reddit work for partners says the same: rankings rise, fall, and recover on their own, so nothing here should depend on Reddit keeping its place on Google. What survives a change of mind at Google is what you move onto your own site: the buyer’s question as your headline, and your best objection answered in public.
Getting Your Brand Into These Threads Is The Work
A brand gets into a ranking thread one of two ways: named in a thread that already holds the search, or in a new thread that grows into one. Both are Reddit marketing, and both pass or fail on the same test as the thread itself, which is whether it answers the buyer’s question.
That is a large part of the GEO work Empact Partners runs. The two routes run on different clocks:
The rules draw one line, around deception. Reddit asks people to participate authentically and bans content manipulation. The FTC’s Endorsement Guides (revised June 29, 2023) and its fake reviews rule (in force since October 21, 2024) cover bought votes, fake reviews, and undisclosed reviews by a company’s own officers and managers. None of this is legal advice.
Google weighs who started a thread far less than whether it answers the search: the r/issuetrak listicle, posted in a vendor-named subreddit, holds first place for “zendesk alternatives” with one upvote. For your own team, the question is narrower: whether a thread about you deserves a reply from someone at your company.
| What you find | Reply? | How, with disclosure | What to fix on your own site instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| A factual error about your product | Yes, once | From a named account that says where you work in the first line; correct the fact and leave the opinion around it alone | Put the corrected fact on the page that ranks below the thread, in a sentence a buyer could quote |
| A fair complaint | Yes, if something changed | Say your role, agree with the part that’s true, and say what changed and when; no discount codes | Fix the thing, then put the limit and the fix on your comparison page |
| A competitor recommended over you | Usually not | One disclosed reply, only if the asker’s needs fit you, saying who you’re for and who you aren’t | Build the comparison page that thread is answering, with the honest limit included |
| An old thread, closed to replies | You can’t | Reddit can archive older posts, and the first result for “hubspot vs salesforce” takes no comments or votes | Your own page is the only reply left, so make it answer the same question better |
| A thread that praises you | No | Thanking it from a brand account adds nothing a buyer trusts | Ask the customer whether you can quote them on your site, by name |
Run A Reddit SEO Audit On Your Top Ten Buying Searches
The audit takes an afternoon: search your ten most valuable commercial terms logged out, record every thread on page one, and judge each one on its title, its first useful answer, and whether anyone can still change it. Paste this into a doc and work down it:
Everything above runs on an afternoon and a spreadsheet. What it can’t do is the next part: deciding which threads are worth being in, working out which questions buyers will search next year, and the slow work of being named in public by people who use your product, which takes quarters and someone whose job it is.
This audit is where a GEO engagement with Empact Partners starts. We’re a go-to-market consultancy that has worked inside B2B software companies’ own marketing teams since 2020. We run it across a partner’s whole category, a named senior consultant owns it, and the partner’s team brings the searches sales hears and the objections that lose deals.
The roadmap that follows says which threads to answer and which pages to rebuild. How we research titles and support a thread after posting stays ours. GEO takes months before momentum shows, and it’s worth more in year three than in year one.
The same audit reaches past Google. In G2’s 2025 survey of 1,169 B2B decision makers, AI chatbots shaped vendor shortlists more than any other source, at 17.1%, and forums like Reddit sat near the bottom, though G2 sells review placement. The thread now reaches your buyer through the chatbot quoting it, so run the audit on what buyers ask ChatGPT too.
If threads you didn’t write are answering your buyers’ searches before your own pages do, book a call with us, and we’ll walk you through how we’d run this audit and the thread work after it for your category.
