The importance of brand visibility might be at an all-time high.
While marketers had traditionally been able to lean on search engines and SEO for brand awareness, there is an evolution currently underway that’s getting everyone’s attention: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
The current search landscape has customers using longer, more specific question-based queries — think, “What’s the best laptop for a kid just starting college?” — that require more answer-based content. And according to our recent 2026 State of the Website report, almost two-thirds of marketing leaders (64%) report their teams are already actively building content with large language models and AEO in mind.
Many are shifting their strategies to account for the way people search, but there’s a key step that’s required before taking action. You have to understand what your audience is most interested in.
And that’s where earned media and Reddit come in.
Harnessing the power of community and conversation
To understand what people are most interested in, it makes logical sense to be where the people are. With over 100,000+ active communities and 116M+ daily active uniques, Reddit is where real people form communities, get answers, share ideas, discuss life, and offer advice. It is one of the most intent-driven locations to learn directly from the source what your audience wants to know more about your brand.
By listening to Reddit conversations, you’ll be able to learn more about:
- Emerging topics related to your brand
- New audiences that are niche or overlapping with your brand
- Inventive product use cases from users themselves
- Competitive intelligence to know where you’re winning and falling behind
- The tone, sentiment, and humor of your core audience
- Raw, unfiltered feedback and reactions to your brand
Surveys and outreach can get you some of the way to understanding what your audience is most curious about, but places like Reddit give people the freedom and comfort to speak openly about what they really want to know.
By monitoring these conversations, you gain a real-time understanding of how people perceive your brand, allowing you to refine your message and engage with audiences in a more meaningful, and relevant way.
Where to incorporate Reddit’s social listening insights in your AEO strategy
There are a few key areas to tap when looking to bring social media insights into your AEO strategies: your website, content marketing, and product marketing channels.
The website
As your most comprehensive digital channel to explain your brand to humans and AI search engines, the website is the home of where your AEO strategies live. Learning tone and emotional cues will help you connect with your audience, but to get that crucial AEO visibility and AI search engine citation, you need to structure your website on page and technically to answer the questions you glean from Reddit conversations.
Content marketing
The biggest challenge of a content marketer’s AEO efforts is determining which topics are most relevant to the customer. When looking at your brand from a customer’s point of view, what would be the first — and second and third… — question to ask?
Digging through Reddit’s various communities and following engaged threads are gold mines for insight into what questions your content can answer.
Product marketing
There’s the brand’s recommended way to use a product, and there’s how users actually tinker with the product. Reddit threads have both users and others you haven’t even thought of yet showing off their use cases, successes, innovations, and struggles.
With the Product and Solutions pages filling the role of some of the most viewed and engaged pages on your site, it’s important to learn from your social listening efforts to know what features need further explanation, if your messaging is landing, and where the roadmap can go from here to address feedback.
Putting it all together
Marketing isn’t a one-way street. Listening to the audience is just as important as what you’re sending out.
In collaboration with Reddit, we’ve created a resource that dives deeper into t how you can turn real conversations into brand strategy in the new AEO visibility era, connect with your audience better than ever before.
For more information, download the full Social Listening for Marketers Report: How Reddit Conversations Act as a Strategic Radar.
