When the fine-jewelry company Brilliant Earth posted a job ad looking for a "Reddit strategy manager," tasked with shaping how the brand shows up in conversation "that cascades across search engines, LLMs, and customer decision-making," an alarm went off at r/jewelry.
"If there's a sudden wave of positive Brilliant Earth content on here, it might not be coincidental," a moderator warned the Reddit community devoted to jewelry, accompanying the message with a siren emoji.
"We are discussing the best way to discourage these larger brands to infiltrate possibly the very last place on the internet for genuine company reviews and feedback," the moderator added.
The AI revolution has transformed Reddit from an afterthought in many marketers' digital strategies to their social-media site du jour. Executives are racing to make sure their brands are recommended by artificial intelligence chatbots, and Reddit is the most-cited website in AI answers, according to AI visibility data firm Parse.
But nothing has changed about the platform's devoted users, many of whom remain as inhospitable as ever to the kind of unchecked brand chatter that prevails elsewhere.
"It's like, 'We don't want to hear from you when we're gossiping about you,'" said social media consultant Rachel Karten, author of the Link in Bio newsletter.
Reddit users congregate on various interest-led subreddits that are governed by their own rules and customs. Marketers can buy ads, which appear labeled as paid-for posts. But many of Reddit's de facto rulers -- the unpaid, mostly-anonymous moderators who police each subreddit and wield automated management tools -- are determined to keep any other whiff of marketing out of the organic feeds they lovingly cultivate. Others impose strict limits on promotional activity in subreddit conversation, such as allowing it only on certain days of the week.
Users -- brand-affiliated or otherwise -- who break subreddits' promotional rules often find their comments deleted at best and their accounts banned at worst.
Law-abiding citizens
Some companies have managed to crack the platform after years of work, primarily by not marketing their products at all. Audio brand Sonos, for example, managed to instill goodwill within the Sonos subreddit by sending in a company-affiliated user known as KeithFromSonos to help with technical customer support problems and translate corporate announcements into everyday parlance.
Fidelity, meanwhile, has built popular subreddits around its investment and crypto offerings by convening general finance discussions and publishing guides and tips.
But moderators who were historically more lenient toward promotional posts have started pushing back after a deluge of Reddit posts designed to manipulate AI search results.
"We as moderators and regular users have been suffering from the constant influx of promotional content, spam, ads, and all sorts of campaigns that flood this and many other subs," a moderator of the software-as-a-service subreddit wrote in June, announcing a ban on posts touting SaaS services in advertising, promotion and sales. "Today we say ENOUGH!"
The less-than-friendly welcome can come as a shock to new-to-Reddit marketers, who have for years enjoyed the ability to post whatever they desire to brand pages on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
"We say over and over again that Reddit organic content can't be promotional, it has to offer some objective helpfulness," said Jonny Waite, the CEO and co-founder of Recho, which advertises itself as a full-service Reddit agency. "That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of marketers."
At nine months old, Recho is part of a relatively new cottage industry of firms capitalizing on marketers' interest in and confusion around Reddit. It encourages marketers to spend weeks lurking on the platform to understand the nuances and etiquettes of various subreddits, and to only post when they can offer something of value to communities that seem amenable to a brand's presence.
Other firms offer a different approach.
Reddit Marketing Agency promises on its website to post comments for clients using "profiles that moderators recognize as legitimate community members" and reduce the visibility of negative comments. Just Reddit Agency says brands can get 35 to 100 brand mentions a month on Reddit for fees starting at $2,500. A more robust reputation management package including positive posts as well as the removal or replacement of negative content begins at $4,500 a month.
Reddit Marketing Agency didn't return requests for comment. Shawna Newman, the owner of Just Reddit Agency, said she encourages brands to think of Reddit as just one part of their wider search and AI optimization campaigns.
Reddit said in a statement that marketers should be skeptical of any agency that promises Reddit as a means to AI visibility or other kinds of internet optimization.
"If you're coming to our platform as a way to hack the results on another platform, it's usually going to wind up with unhappy results for you," said Adam Collins, chief communications officer at Reddit, which has discussed shutting off Google's access to its content for AI use, The Wall Street Journal reported in July.
Listening tours
Reddit on the whole encourages brands to play in the Reddit sandbox so long as they arrive with utility, humility and respect, Collins said.
Reddit for the most part steers brands toward its paid advertising division, which generated revenue of $762 million in the latest quarter, up 64% over the period a year earlier. The company recently introduced a feature that integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser's creative, as well as tools that mine the site for insights to inform ad campaigns and product decisions.
Brilliant Earth in a statement said it continues to participate in public conversations across the platform and manages its own subreddit, an approach it says Reddit recommended.
The company ultimately hired a community engagement manager for all of its social channels, including Reddit, a spokesperson said. A new user, Naomi_Brilliant Earth, began posting to and moderating the company's subreddit in March.
But some brands are switching to listening.
The mealkit provider HelloFresh at the end of last year introduced "Katie," described as an employee of the meal kit service's social and community team, into the subreddit for its customers. Katie over the next few months was a prolific participant in the conversation, acknowledging product feedback, sharing information about delivery delays and product recalls, and posting chipper comments like "The chicken sausage is SO good" even when customers hurled the occasional rude complaint her way.
Then in April, she went silent.
"Katie and our team continue to learn a great deal from the community," its spokesperson said, "and we are now evaluating those insights to refine how we leverage the platform moving forward."