A few months back, a premium DTC brand came to us with a problem I had not seen quite this bluntly before. Their product was genuinely good. Real customers loved it. But if you asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, or even just poked around on Reddit for thirty seconds, you would think they were running some kind of overpriced scam operation.

That is not an exaggeration. The word “scam” was showing up next to their name in threads with thousands of views. And because Reddit is now one of the top sources AI engines pull from when they answer questions, that narrative was leaking straight into every AI response about their category.

This is the story of what we did about it, what it cost, what it returned, and why I now think Reddit GEO might be one of the most underpriced plays in marketing right now. I am going to keep the client name out of this because that was the deal, but the numbers are all real and pulled straight from Search Console and GA4.

The Situation We Walked Into

Picture this. You sell a premium product in a category dominated by mass-market giants. Your fragrance is better. Your packaging is better. Your story is better. But you charge more, and the internet does not always love “more.”

Here is what the baseline looked like when we started:

• 2,436 monthly AI citations, but a meaningful chunk of them were negative or neutral at best
• Average sentiment score of -3.0 across the three subreddits that mattered most for their buyer
• Threads in r/laundry, r/fragrance, and r/CleaningTips were dominated by pricing complaints and “is this a scam” posts
• Zero owned presence in any of those communities to push back, clarify, or just share honest customer stories

The worst part was not the negative threads themselves. It was the compounding effect. Every time someone asked an AI tool “what are the best laundry pods,” the model was pulling from those exact threads and either leaving the brand out entirely or mentioning it alongside the complaints. Competitors were getting handed share of voice for free.

If you have ever watched a brand narrative spiral out of your control in public, you know the feeling. There is no press release that fixes it. You cannot buy your way out with ads. You have to actually show up in the communities where the conversation is happening, and you have to do it in a way that does not feel like a brand showing up.

Why We Went After Reddit Specifically

I will be honest, a year ago I would not have pitched a Reddit campaign to anyone. Reddit has a long memory and a short fuse for anything that smells like marketing. But two things changed my mind.

First, AI engines started citing Reddit constantly. If you have not looked at where Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews pull their sources from lately, go check. Reddit is everywhere. The models treat it as authoritative user-generated content, which means a well-placed, genuinely useful Reddit thread can feed every AI answer in your category for months.

Second, Reddit posts do not decay the way paid ads do. A good thread gets upvoted, indexed, and then keeps working. You stop paying and the asset keeps producing. That is the opposite of how most marketing spend works.

So the question stopped being “should we do this” and started being “can we do this without getting banned or making things worse.” That is a real risk on Reddit, and it is the reason most brands get it wrong.

The Four-Phase Playbook

Here is roughly how we ran it. I am not going to pretend this is some proprietary framework. It is mostly just doing the obvious things carefully and in the right order.

Phase 1: Intelligence

Before we touched a single account, we did a full audit. Every relevant subreddit, every recurring complaint, every competitor mention, every thread that was already pulling traffic. We mapped the “scam” narrative thread by thread and figured out which objections were actually killing conversions and which ones were just noise.

The output was not a deck. It was a list of specific content angles that could counter the pricing objection without sounding defensive, and a short list of high-traffic threads that were worth participating in.

Phase 2: Accounts and Community Credibility

This is the part most agencies skip, and it is the part that decides whether you succeed or get roasted. We built ten distinct Reddit accounts, each with a believable voice and history. Then we spent weeks just participating in communities, building karma, helping people, being useful. No brand talk at all.

If you try to shortcut this, Reddit will eat you alive. I have seen it happen. The accounts have to earn the right to be in the conversation before they say anything about a product.

Phase 3: Content

Once the accounts had standing, we started posting. Not ads. Stories. Real use cases. Honest testimonials. The occasional “I was skeptical about the price but here is what I found” post, written the way a real person would write it.

The rule was simple: every post had to be something we would have been happy to read even if we had no stake in the brand. That is the bar. If it fails that test, it does not go up.

The comments were the same. Always helpful, always honest, never overtly branded. Over time the posts and comments started connecting to each other, forming a small but real ecosystem of content that felt native to each community.

Phase 4: Measurement

I have been burned before by campaigns that “felt like they were working” but did not show up in the numbers. So we tracked everything from day one.

• 20 AI prompts tracked monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews
• Sentiment scores per subreddit, before during and after
• Monthly citation volume across all five platforms
• Branded search traffic, LLM-referred sessions, and revenue attribution via GA4 and Search Console
  

Without that baseline the whole case study you are reading right now would not exist.

What Actually Happened

The campaign ran for three months. Here is what the scoreboard looked like when we pulled the numbers.

Visibility and sentiment:

• Monthly AI citations went from 2,436 to 5,220. That is a 114% lift, or 2,784 net new citations per month
• Sentiment across the three priority subreddits flipped from -3.0 to +3.7, a 6.7-point swing
• One post in r/laundry hit 3M+ views, 2.9K upvotes, and 233 comments. 70% of the engagement came from the exact demographic the brand sells to
• Reddit threads now account for 40% of all AI citations that mention the brand

Revenue impact:

Here is the part that mattered to the CFO. We compared the 3.5 months before the campaign started to the 3.5 months after.

• Branded traffic: 13,886 to 16,755, up 20.7%
• Branded revenue: $139,185 to $169,939, up 22.1%
• Incremental revenue directly attributable to the campaign: $30,754
• Campaign cost: $15,510
• Net profit after cost: $15,244
• ROI: 98%. ROAS: 1.98x

Additional brand indicators:

• LLM-referred sessions up 89%, from 672 to 1,269
• Unprompted brand mentions in AI responses went from 8 to 23, a 188% increase
• 86% of tracked AI prompts now surface the brand with positive sentiment
• Branded queries moved to #2 SERP position

The Comparison That Surprised Me

We pulled the brand’s paid ads data for the same period, just to sanity-check whether the Reddit work was actually adding anything or whether ads were doing the lifting. Here is what we found.

When the brand significantly increased paid ad spend, revenue barely moved. Every incremental dollar of ad spend was returning less than it cost. Paid had hit saturation. They were spending more to get less.

Meanwhile the Reddit campaign returned $1.98 per dollar, and those dollars built an asset that keeps working after you stop spending. That is the part that I think a lot of brands miss. Paid ads are a faucet. You turn them off, the water stops. Reddit threads and AI citations are more like a reservoir. Fill it up, and it keeps feeding the system.

Why I Think This Keeps Working

A few reasons this is not a one-time fluke.

• AI engines like Reddit. 40% of citations for this brand now trace back to Reddit threads we created or influenced. That is not going to reverse. If anything, AI engines are going to lean on community content more, not less.
• Positive sentiment compounds. Every thread we seeded keeps getting indexed, keeps getting upvoted, keeps getting cited. Unlike an ad, it does not stop working when the budget stops.
• You cannot shortcut community authority. The accounts we built have karma, history, and credibility. Competitors cannot replicate that overnight. Even if they copy the playbook tomorrow, they are starting from zero.
• Branded traffic converts. The 20.7% lift in branded search produced $30,754 in incremental revenue in just a few months. That is the cleanest attribution we have ever pulled on a GEO campaign.

The Honest Takeaways

I am not going to pretend this is a silver bullet. A few things to keep in mind if you are thinking about trying something similar.

• If your product is not actually good, Reddit will figure that out before we can help you. The strategy only works when the underlying thing is worth defending
• The account and community setup phase is the whole game. Rush it and you will get banned
• You need at least three months to see the compounding effect. One month of posts does not move the needle enough to matter
• Measurement has to be in place from day one or you will be telling a story instead of showing one

What I Would Tell A Founder Reading This

If your brand is at the stage where paid ads are hitting diminishing returns, and you are starting to notice that AI answers about your category leave you out or get you wrong, this is the window. Reddit GEO is still undervalued because most agencies have not figured out how to do it without getting blown up, and most brands are still pouring money into paid channels that are quietly saturating.

We put about $15K into this campaign. It returned $30K in the first 3.5 months, and it keeps running in the background. The threads are still there. The AI citations are still climbing. The sentiment scores are still holding.

That is the kind of asset I like building for clients. Something that keeps paying out after you stop feeding it.

If you want to see whether something like this would work for your brand, that is the kind of conversation I actually enjoy having. No pitch deck, no jargon, just a look at your category and an honest read on whether the play makes sense for you.