Reddit Strategy: Authentic Helpfulness Beats Mass Spam

Reddit's power as an AEO citation source lies in its authenticity, not volume. Unlike traditional SEO tactics that prioritize scale, Ethan Smith found that a small number of genuine, helpful contributions on Reddit can significantly boost your visibility in AI answer engines.

When Webflow wanted to improve their presence in LLM responses, they discovered that Reddit was one of the most heavily cited sources in these answers. Rather than attempting to create hundreds of fake accounts and automated comments (which Reddit's community quickly identifies and removes), they took a fundamentally different approach.

Their strategy was remarkably simple but effective: have actual team members create Reddit accounts, clearly identify themselves and their company affiliation, and then provide genuinely helpful responses to relevant questions. As Smith explains, "At Webflow we have a couple people going to comments and saying this is my name, this is where I work and here's a useful piece of information."

The key insight is that you don't need massive scale - "you don't actually need 10,000 comments, even five could be great." This approach works because LLMs are designed to surface authentic, helpful information, and Reddit's community moderation naturally filters out spam and low-quality content.

The implementation is straightforward:

1. Find threads related to your product or service that are likely to appear in citations
2. Create a named account that clearly states who you are and where you work
3. Provide genuinely helpful information that adds value to the conversation
4. Focus on quality over quantity - a few excellent contributions beat mass automation
5. Be consistent but authentic - this isn't about gaming the system

This tactic is particularly valuable for early-stage companies that might struggle with traditional SEO due to low domain authority. Since LLMs prioritize helpful information regardless of source authority, even new companies can quickly gain visibility through thoughtful Reddit contributions.

The results can be significant - Webflow saw a 6x higher conversion rate from LLM traffic compared to traditional search traffic, indicating that users who discover products through answer engines are highly qualified leads with strong intent.