Business owners across nearly every industry run into the same frustrating issue, and it only gets worse. Reddit controls what shows up when someone searches for a brand name, and businesses don’t even need to be active on the platform for this to happen.
Around 73% of businesses already have some Reddit threads that rank for their brand names, and 63% of these conversations are negative. A company can pour money into a polished website with the right keywords and professional content. But none of that seems to matter when a random forum post outranks everything else.
Everything has changed almost overnight. Reddit’s search visibility shot up by 1,328% between mid-2023 and early 2024 (yes, that’s the actual number), and by August 2024, the platform had climbed to third place in Google’s U.S. rankings. A fresh thread posted today can appear in Google’s top ten results in just minutes – meanwhile, a brand new landing page on your website might take weeks before Google even sees that it exists. Businesses have lost control over how their customers discover them and, more to the point, what information those customers read first!
Let’s talk about why Reddit outranks traditional websites in search results.
Bad Reddit Threads Hurt Your Business
A Reddit thread that shows up in the top three search results for your brand name is a big problem, and it won’t go away on its own. Once that thread lands in one of the top results, it can stay there for months or years. Every person who searches for your company is going to see it first, and they’ll probably read through it before they click on the official content you’ve spent time creating for them.
Almost everyone who wants to learn about your business is going to pull up Google and search for your name. They’ll type it in, hit enter and start scrolling through whatever comes up. If the second or third result happens to be a Reddit thread where somebody is complaining about a bad experience with your company, that’s what’s going to stick in their mind before they ever make it to your website. You could have the most polished, professional website in your whole industry. But it won’t help much if they’re already making up their opinions based on conversations they’re reading in other places online.
United Airlines is one of the best examples of this phenomenon. Their customer service disasters from a few years back continue to show up in Reddit threads, and many of these threads still rank very well in search results. New customers find these discussions all the time. To United’s credit, they’ve worked hard to turn their service around since then. But those old Reddit threads aren’t going anywhere. They sit there like permanent records and repeat a version of the story that United can’t edit, respond to or make disappear.
Reddit threads are much harder for you to deal with than a bad review on your own site or on a review platform. On most other review channels, you’ll be able to respond directly to the customer complaints, or at the very least work with the platform’s dispute system to try and resolve issues. Reddit threads don’t work like that at all. They live outside of your control, and you can’t delete them, you can’t easily push them down in the search rankings, and you can’t change what commenters have already said in them.
If somebody decides to research your company and the first content they run into is a pile of negative comments and reviews, well before they’ve even landed on your website or seen any of your marketing materials, it’s going to hurt your conversion rates. The cost to bring in each new customer starts climbing because it takes a lot more effort and multiple points of contact to build that trust after they’ve already read something negative. And in the meantime, your entire team gets stuck in a cleanup mode, trying to fix the problem instead of working on the work that actually grows the business.
Google Ranks Reddit Above Your Content
Google pays close attention to what goes on after a person lands on a page, and they use that behavioral data to work out where pages should rank. When a user clicks into a Reddit thread and reads through dozens of comments, Google is watching that activity. Upvotes count too, along with when users chime in and add to the conversation themselves.
Reddit threads pull in engagement numbers that most other websites can only dream about. One thread can rack up hundreds of comments in just a few hours or maybe a day or two. Users will scroll through these long conversations and actually take the time to read what everyone has to say. It’s not uncommon for a single thread to hold someone’s attention for 5, maybe even 10 minutes straight.
Search engines are always keeping track of how users behave on websites to see if the content actually helps or just adds noise. When a person lands on a page and sticks around for a while, maybe clicks through to another post or scrolls through most of the content, it tells Google that the page probably delivered something worthwhile. Google has been pretty vocal about this as a core focus in their algorithm updates throughout 2023 and 2024. Their stated goal is to reward what they call user-first content and to push those pages higher in the search results.
This is a big problem for website owners. A content creator might spend weeks putting together a well-researched piece – with great sources, everything fact-checked, carefully edited and information that really helps readers. Google might still place a Reddit thread above it in the search results. When that thread gets tons of comments and holds readers’ attention for a while, Google sees all that activity as a sign that the content is worth their time, though the information itself might not quite match up.
Professional content and user engagement are two different aspects in terms of how much time gets spent on a page. A well-written piece might answer the question in 800 words, and most readers will finish it in under 2 minutes before they move on. Reddit threads work differently because they become longer conversations where members ask follow-ups and share their own experiences. Google picks up on all that extra activity and treats it as a signal that the content has to be worth something.
Reddit Users Talk the Way People Search
Reddit threads mirror the exact language users use when they search for something online. A person types “why is company charging me after I cancelled” into Google, and what pops up are Reddit posts with that exact same wording. Your website probably has a section called “billing questions,” “payment questions,” or something along those lines. The difference between these two ways can create problems for business owners who don’t account for this mismatch.
The language on your website and the words customers actually type into Google are usually two different vocabularies. Customers search the same way that they talk to their friends. Say a customer spots a strange charge on their credit card statement, and they’re going to pull up Google and type something like “weird charges on credit card” or “charges I don’t know about.” They’re not about to search for your well-thought-out “account statement discrepancies” page (even if that sounds more professional to you).
Reddit picks up on these very specific searches without even the need to optimize for them. A thread starts with one basic question, and from there the conversation branches out into all kinds of related topics. A single thread about subscription cancellations could cover refund timelines, bank processing delays, how to dispute charges and which customer service number actually gets results.
A single thread like that can answer twenty or thirty related questions at the same time. Each person who comments is going to use slightly different words to describe the same basic concept, and Google’s algorithm picks up on all these variations. It matches them to dozens of different search queries that customers might type in when they need information.
That polished content on your website is actually working against you here. Writing with formal language and clean grammar means missing all of the messy ways your customers talk about their problems. Reddit users write the way they think. One person might ramble for a bit and then eventually circle back to their main point. Another person might add in some random detail that seems unimportant at the time. But those little tangents usually match what other customers are curious about as well.
Reddit’s unpolished, authentic feel is a big part of why it performs well in search results. The platform is full of genuine questions from users, and those questions get answered by others who have dealt with the same problems. Polished, optimized copy for your own site probably reads better on the page. It sounds more professional, and it looks cleaner overall. But it mostly only covers one or two of the ways that a person might phrase their search query, and it misses most of the other variations that users type into Google when they need help.
Build Your Brand Across Multiple Sites
Reddit conversations about your brand need attention, whether you like it or not – it’s just part of the business online at this point. Alert systems will send you a notification the second a user mentions your company name or your products anywhere on the platform. That way, you can catch negative threads early on, and you still have the time to actually respond and do something constructive about them.
FAQ pages can work really well when they sound like conversations between actual users instead of some stiff corporate Q&A sections. Part of why Reddit ranks so well comes from how users on the platform write the way they talk to one another. You could use that same conversational feel in your FAQ content, and it doesn’t have to make it sound forced or phony.
A forum or comment section on your own website might actually be worth setting up. Creating a dedicated space for conversations right on your domain gives your audience another place to visit when they have questions or want to discuss your content. Reddit’s massive reach will obviously be hard to compete with. That said, a platform under your full control comes with real advantages.
Reddit is another platform where you can join industry discussions and build some credibility with future customers. Authenticity matters there, though – promotional accounts are pretty simple to see, and users will usually ignore them completely. When you answer questions or leave comments, think about how you can help others instead of how to squeeze in a sales pitch. Share what you’ve learned, be honest in your answers and remember that each comment doesn’t need to promote your business.
Trying to compete with Reddit based purely on domain authority just won’t work for most websites – their site strength is far too established to beat them in any direct contest. Dilution tends to be a much better move in situations like this. What you should do is create multiple positive alternatives that can show up in different places across the web. Blog posts that answer the same questions that your audience is looking for, case studies that can appear in related searches and videos that target similar keywords will all work together to push that negative content lower and lower in the results.
None of this will erase what already ranks on Reddit. What it does do is give searchers more options when they’re looking for information about your brand. Some of your content will land on the first page right alongside those Reddit threads, and I see this happen all of the time – it’s probably the most reasonable goal to shoot for anyway.
Monitor and Manage Your Reputation
Your online reputation strategy needs to account for this reality. Fighting Reddit is a losing battle – the platform has too much authority and too much reach to overcome with brute force. What tends to work out better is to focus your time and energy on every other place where customers are looking you up. Reply to the reviews on the sites where it makes sense to engage. Jump into relevant discussions if you have something useful to add. Build out your presence so when those Reddit threads do appear in the search results (and they will), they’re surrounded by plenty of other content that tells your side of the story. A well-rounded presence online is always going to serve you better than if you try to silence or overpower a single platform that frankly isn’t going anywhere.
Your customers are already out there on different sites. They look for answers and do their research. If a person searches for your brand on Google and a Reddit thread shows up in the results, that’s actually fine. What makes it a big problem is when those threads are full of unanswered questions, complaints that nobody ever dealt with or negative reviews that are just sitting there with no response. Your customers are going to talk about your brand online – you’ll have to show up in those conversations and actually contribute something useful to them.
If all this seems like a bit much, well, it can be. Reputation management when situations get rough isn’t something you can wing with a few quick fixes and some hopeful damage control. It takes genuine experience and a custom strategy that’s built around your situation specifically. At Reputation.ca, we specialize in this (reviews, social media, public relations and crisis response) and we’ve been doing it longer than just about anyone else in Canada. Maybe you’ll have to handle a cancel culture situation, or maybe you just want to make sure your presence online is as strong as it should be. In either case, we can help. Get in touch with us for help that actually makes sense for what you’re going through.
