I knew Reddit had officially made it into the 2027 planning conversation when people stopped asking whether brands should care about it and started asking how we’re supposed to get on it.
Which is funny, because people have spent years using Reddit as a workaround for marketing.
When Google results got too polished, too SEO’d, or too full of pages written by someone who had clearly never used the thing they were recommending, people started adding “Reddit” to the end of their searches. I’ve done it. You probably have too. You want the person who bought the vacuum, took the medication, tried the moisturizer, stayed at the hotel, or developed a strangely specific opinion about whatever you’re researching.
There is something very marketing about watching people create a workaround for marketing and immediately deciding we need a strategy for getting inside the workaround.
Now GEO has given us another reason to care.
OpenAI has a partnership with Reddit that gives it access to Reddit’s Data API, including real-time structured content. Google has a separate partnership with Reddit that gives it programmatic access to Reddit’s public posts and comments.
I’m not going to spend half this newsletter litigating whether an LLM can technically “trust” Reddit. It can’t trust anything in the human sense. What matters for marketers is that Reddit is part of the information available to systems people increasingly use to research products, companies and categories.
And Reddit is only one piece of the bigger change.
Your website is not the whole source strategy anymore
Most GEO conversations still start like search conversations.
What should we change on the website? What questions should we answer? How should we structure the page? How do we show up in ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Mode?
All reasonable questions. Google says the normal SEO fundamentals still matter for its AI search experiences.
But Google also says those experiences may surface information from blogs, videos, forums and other parts of the web.
So, what you write on your website is super important but now so are other sources explaining your brand and the category.
Now instead of optimizing a page we’re thinking through questions like: What are people saying on Reddit? Which creators keep showing up? What does the expert who has been writing about this topic for seven years say? What do reviews say? Which publishers get referenced? Where does incorrect information keep getting repeated?
That is a bigger job than optimizing a page. It starts to look like source strategy.