How Much Traffic Reddit Steals From You (And How to Get It Back)

For the past several years, content marketers have noticed that one site seems to have a very easy time climbing the SERPs: Reddit.

No fancy SEO strategies. No perfectly optimized landing pages. Just endless forums full of everyday users sharing their opinions and ending up as the first result for countless searches.

While Reddit is one more challenge for content marketers to overcome, it’s also a goldmine of high-intent keywords, consumer insights, and even positive brand sentiment. You just need to know where, exactly, to look.

Why Google Loves Reddit

At first glance, it seems strange that Google would prioritize Reddit threads over traditional longform content. After all, blog posts are full of information, often from very reliable sources, and have been optimized to appeal to search engines.

Reddit, on the other hand, is full of opinions from regular, ordinary people. There’s no way to check their credentials on any particular topic, and most responses are only going to cover a thin slice of the available information on a given topic.

And it’s certainly not optimized for SEO.

What Reddit does have that many blog posts lack is authenticity. Google knows that users are tired of being sold to 24/7, and in an effort to provide them with a better user experience, is trying to give them more content from people just like them and less branded content.

AI Overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT often cite Reddit for the same reason.

Especially with users’ mixed feelings about AI, authenticity has solidified itself as the primary currency of content marketing over the past few years. It doesn’t matter how many rules you follow or that you do everything “right” every time you publish.

If your content sounds like anyone could have written it, or like it’s heavily biased towards your own brand, it’s going to struggle to gain visibility.

See How Much Traffic Your Site Loses to Reddit

So, how big a deal is it that Reddit is appearing on page one?

For some sites, it’s a really big deal. If you want to know exactly what the impact of Reddit’s prominence is on your site, I’d recommend trying our free Reddit Opportunity Report tool.

Just type your domain into the search bar.

You’ll see an estimate of how much organic traffic you’re losing to Reddit. As in the example above, it could be millions of visitors every month.

Fortunately, the tool gives you several actionable insights to work with so you can recapture some of that lost traffic.

How to take Organic Traffic Back from Reddit

Content marketers are not entirely without options when it comes to recovering organic traffic lost to Reddit. In fact, there are several ways you can go about it. If one proves less than successful, you might be able to attract more visitors with another.

Here are four ways you can use Reddit to help instead of hurt your brand.

Method One: Use Reddit to Find High-Intent Keywords

High-intent keywords are search terms consumers use when they’re ready to make a purchase. Reddit posts are a prime source for finding high intent keywords because they give you context around what people want to know about your brand and related topics.

As a starting point, look at your Reddit Opportunity Report and scroll down to the Reddit Ranking Keywords section.

These are keywords Reddit is already ranking on page one for, meaning:

1. You’re probably losing traffic to Reddit for these terms
2. Google considers the conversations happening around these keywords on Reddit to be highly authoritative and relevant to searchers

Run the keywords through Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool and look for any with low keyword difficulty. This gives you the perfect intersection of high intent and low competition, which often leads to high rankings and a high conversion rate.

Next, search the term in Google and look at the Reddit results that are ranking.

Read through the comments in the threads to learn what people are saying about this keyword. For example, for “trend monitoring,” searchers are generally looking for tool recommendations. You could use the suggestions here to write listicles or comparison posts.

Other points people made were around pricing and social listening vs. trend monitoring.

With minimal effort, we just came up with at least three ideas for blog posts we could write to take traffic back from Reddit for this keyword. Repeat the process for multiple keywords, and you could easily have a content calendar full of high-converting topics.

Method Two: Participate Organically in Reddit Threads

Showing up on Reddit is another way you can make this platform work for your brand instead of against it.

Unlike other social media platforms, you can’t just post endlessly about your brand on Reddit. It has very strict spam policies, and too many downvotes (negative engagement with your comments) can lead to your account being disabled.

Instead, I would liken Reddit marketing to thought leadership. It’s more about the less tangible metrics of authority and brand sentiment than it is about directly driving traffic or conversions.

To find relevant subreddits to participate in, you can look at your Reddit Opportunity Report under Your Target Communities.

You can also search for some of those keywords you looked up from the Reddit Ranking Keywords section, click on the Reddit results for those keywords, and look into the subreddits those posts appear in.

A couple of things to keep in mind when choosing threads to post in:

• Make sure to check the age of the original post and the most recent comments. Engaging with a thread that hasn’t been touched in over a year won’t help you as much as adding your thoughts on an active thread.
• Only post relevant, useful comments. Other users can upvote or downvote your responses, and too many downvotes will not only impact your Reddit account’s viability, but could affect your brand reputation, too.

The goal of posting on Reddit is to present your brand as helpful and invested in your niche’s online community. You might not send traffic to your site with every comment you post, but improving your brand’s reputation can send traffic to your site in other ways, like via AI citations.

Reddit Profile Warming

Building an organic following on Reddit is a long game. You can’t just show up in threads and start dropping links to your products.

Profile warming is the practice of slowly starting to engage more and more with content on Reddit to build legitimacy so you can safely post occasional comments that specifically mention your brand.

To warm up your Reddit profile:

1. Browse threads across multiple subreddits. Anything you’re genuinely interested in is fine, even if it’s not directly related to your niche (although you should look for threads related to your industry, too).
2. Upvote other users’ comments. Only upvote comments that are genuinely helpful. You can’t fake Reddit engagement and win in the long run. It’s also best to avoid suddenly upvoting hundreds of comments a day. Start with just a few and work up to more.
3. Leave your own comments on other users’ threads. It’s essential that you do your best to provide actually helpful insights. Don’t post links or mention your brand right away, and make sure to post across a variety of subreddits. If your comments receive a lot of downvotes, you may trigger Reddit’s security monitoring system.

You can keep track of how trustworthy Reddit thinks your account is by monitoring your karma and Contributor Quality Score (CQS).

There are no “quick wins” with Reddit. You have to engage authentically and consistently, and only then will you be able to start sharing direct links to your content without raising red flags.

Even then, avoid posting the same link over and over again, and continue to provide genuinely helpful comments. Use links extremely sparingly, and only share them if they’re actually relevant to the discussion.

Method Three: Boost Your Brand Sentiment and Third-Party AI Citations

Like Google, LLMs frequently cite Reddit in their responses to users.

This makes it a useful arena for increasing third-party AI citations to your site, as well as improving your brand sentiment. Engaging with content on Reddit like I described in the previous method can help with these metrics in addition to your brand authority.

To track your AI citations from Reddit, I recommend using Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit. It enables you to:

• See AI citations from Reddit that mention your brand
• Monitor specific prompts that cite content from Reddit related to your brand
• Generate content optimized for those specific prompts

You can find all of this in the Visibility Overview report under Topics & Sources » Cited Sources.

Look for reddit.com and expand the section to view relevant prompts.

Here you’ll find the Monitor and Create Content buttons. I recommend monitoring relevant prompts so you can see when citations change and if your brand continues to appear in responses.

I would also monitor traffic from branded searches to your site in Google Search Console to help assess how effective your efforts in both AEO and Reddit brand reputation building are.

An increase in branded searches implies that your brand awareness is growing, meaning you’ve indirectly earned those visitors back from Reddit by improving your visibility and how users perceive your company.

Method Four: Enhance Your Brand With Market Insights

The last strategy I’ll share for enhancing your marketing practices with Reddit doesn’t directly relate to driving traffic to your website, but can help close gaps in your audience and enable you to reach more customers that way.

On Reddit, real users share their thoughts about your industry and even your specific products and services. By monitoring what people are saying about these topics, you can discover pain points your customers are facing and take action to address them.

This might mean adding or changing product features, introducing new services, adjusting your pricing model, or taking steps to improve your customer service.

However, keep in mind that single complaint is not enough to justify a drastic overhaul of your business. You’ll never make everyone happy, and you don’t want to make a change for one Reddit commenter that ends up causing issues for more customers.

Instead, look for patterns. Consistency across comments warrants your attention.

Once you’ve identified pain points and addressed them, you can create new content about the change and take to Reddit to share the update. This may help counteract negative sentiment on Reddit, and attract traffic to your site from users looking for solutions to these problems.

Recover Lost Traffic With Semrush

Google SERPs are more competitive than ever, and now content marketers have to carve out space for their brands in AI responses, too. Reddit is a key battleground in both of these fights for visibility and organic traffic, making it a worthwhile marketing channel to invest in.

That investment starts with just a few minutes of your time. Our free Reddit Opportunity Report Tool will enable you to discover just how much Reddit is impacting your site’s traffic, as well as keywords you can target to recover some of those lost visitors.

Paired with Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit, the Reddit Opportunity Report Tool can also help you find ways to improve your brand’s perception online and attract traffic—direct and indirect—as a result. A free seven-day trial of Semrush One grants you access to all the features you need to get started.

The rise of Reddit doesn’t have to mean the fall of your brand’s content marketing strategy. With the right tools, you can turn the tide and make Reddit work for you instead of against you.