Decoded: Reddit

The community layer behind modern search and shopping

Reddit has always been hard for marketers to package neatly. It is not a clean feed platform like Instagram, it does not reward the same creative instincts as TikTok, and itt does not give brands the control they get from paid search. A polished line can get ignored. A campaign that feels too scripted can get picked apart.

These characteristics used to make Reddit easy to dismiss. But now, these qualities are exactly why marketers should be paying attention.

The internet is becoming harder to trust. Search results are crowded, product reviews can feel gamed, and many influencer recommendations often come with an affiliate link. AI can summarize almost anything, but it still struggles with the kind of lived experience people want before making a decision.

So people go looking for the Reddit thread.

And this is Reddit’s real advantage. It has spent years building communities where people compare, debate, recommend, complain, correct each other, and occasionally write a better product review than anything on a brand’s website.

So, let’s decode it.

Reddit by the numbers

Reddit reports 127 million daily active uniques, 493 million-plus weekly active uniques, more than 100,000 active communities, and over 24 billion posts and comments. That scale makes it difficult to treat Reddit as a small corner of the internet.

Reddit’s own search research says the top reason people use Reddit for product research is to get opinions from networks or communities. One in three shoppers who first discovered a product through Google, Amazon, or an independent review site later came to Reddit for more research.

In addition to this, Google has publicly said people use Search to find Reddit content for product recommendations, travel advice, and opinions/stories of almost any human experience. That behavior is currently entertwined into Google’s expanded partnership with Reddit.

AI companies want Reddit data because it contains something the rest of the internet is losing: human conversation at scale. OpenAI announced access to Reddit’s Data API in 2024, and Google’s expanded partnership also gives it access to Reddit’s Data API.

And brands are already proving Reddit can drive business results. Škoda saw 255% more Octavia orders than expected. Jack Daniel’s drove more than $5 million in incremental sales. Tushbaby saw 84% higher ROAS compared with other competitive social channels.

Community-first is the edge

While most platforms trained brands to think in audiences, Reddit has forced brands to think in communities.

That difference sounds small until you actually try to market there. A community has norms. It has regulars. It has history. It has inside jokes. It has moderators. It has people who remember when a brand showed up badly two years ago and will happily bring it up again.

That makes Reddit harder to buy your way into. And it also makes the platform more useful.

A beauty brand does not need to guess what skincare buyers care about. People are already debating routines, actives, breakouts, dupes, dermatologists, and product regrets. A car brand does not need to imagine how buyers compare models. That is already happening in car subreddits. Gamers are comparing setups. Travelers are sanity-checking itineraries. B2B buyers are asking which software tools are overhyped.

This is what makes Reddit different from a standard paid social platform.

People are not only consuming content AND trying to solve something.

That matters because community behavior is moving back to the center of marketing. People still discover through feeds, creators, and search. But when the decision starts to feel expensive, risky, or confusing, they look for people who have already been through it. Reddit has those people.

The trust problem Reddit’s format solves

Reddit is benefiting from a much larger shift: trust is getting harder to earn online.

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer reports that 70% of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural background. The study surveyed 33,938 respondents across 28 countries, so this is not a tiny sample. That stat is not about Reddit specifically but it does help to explain why community spaces matter right now.

People are filtering information through smaller circles and they want more context before they trust a recommendation. They want to hear from people who seem closer to the problem. And, most of all, they want the unpolished details that usually get removed from brand content.

Reddit fits that behavior well. A subreddit can have millions of members and still feel specific. The value comes from the shared context. People know what counts as a good answer. They know when someone sounds like they are selling. They know when a recommendation has weight because it comes from experience rather than script.

That is uncomfortable for brands. And it should be. Reddit is one of the few large platforms where brands cannot fully control the conversation around them. For marketers used to polished environments, that can feel risky. For consumers, that is the appeal.

Search has moved into the comments

The most important Reddit behavior often starts on Google.

People search things like:

• best running shoes reddit

• best CRM reddit

• best moisturizer reddit

• best coffee grinder reddit

• best hotels in Tokyo reddit

Google has acknowledged the behavior directly. In its expanded Reddit partnership announcement, Google said people increasingly use Search to find helpful Reddit content, including product recommendations and travel advice. Google also described Reddit as a source of authentic human conversations and experiences.

Reddit has built its own pitch around the same behavior. Its search research says 48% of internet users have to dig through multiple pages of results to find something relevant, while 38% of social users see product recommendations found through search engines, influencers, or Amazon as unsafe, impersonal, or untrustworthy. This is Reddit-sourced research, so brands should read it with that in mind, but the behavior is familiar. We all know what it looks like when someone adds "reddit" to a search because they want the less polished answer.

This has real implications for brands.

A company can rank on Google. It can buy search terms. It can seed creators. It can optimize product pages. Then a consumer searches the category with "reddit" attached and lands in a thread where people are bluntly comparing options. That thread may help the brand or it may hurt the brand. Either way, it is part of the decision journey now.

AI made human context more valuable

There is a reason AI companies want Reddit.

OpenAI announced a partnership with Reddit in May 2024 that gives OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API, which it described as real-time, structured, and unique content. Reddit also said the partnership would help it build AI-powered features for users and moderators.

Google’s expanded partnership gives Google access to Reddit’s Data API too, while Reddit gets access to Vertex AI to improve search and other platform features.

So, the obvious read is that Reddit has a lot of content. The deeper read is that Reddit has a lot of context.

AI can summarize specs. But Reddit can tell you which specs mattered after six months of use.

AI can scan reviews. But Reddit can tell you which reviews sound fake.

AI can produce a confident answer. But Reddit gives you the argument, the correction, the edge case, the person who disagrees, and the person who has actually used the product for a year.

That is what makes Reddit valuable in an AI-heavy internet.

And the app itself is now building products around that. Reddit Answers lets users ask questions and receive AI-generated summaries that pull from relevant Reddit conversations, with links back to communities and posts.

Reddit Community Intelligence, announced at Cannes Lions 2025, turns posts and comments into tools for insights, planning, conversation summaries, and social proof inside ads.

The commerce layer of Reddit

For years, Reddit had the behavior marketers wanted, but the ad product was harder to fit into a performance plan. But this distinction is changing.

Reddit’s shopping materials position the platform around product research and purchase decisions. Reddit says people come to the platform to make important purchase decisions and spend 2.5 times more on Reddit than on other platforms, based on its own 2023 survey. As with any platform-owned research, brands should verify against their own data, but the direction is clear. Reddit wants to be seen as a commerce platform, not only a community site.

Dynamic Product Ads are one of the clearest examples. Reddit says advertisers that ran both Dynamic Product Ads and standard conversion campaigns in Q1 2025 saw 2 times higher ROAS with Dynamic Product Ads. The format pulls from a product catalog and matches products to relevant users and conversations, including communities people join and products they engage with off-platform.

Reddit is also adding more automation. Max campaigns use Reddit Community Intelligence and AI to automate targeting, creative rotation, placements, and budget allocation. In early split tests, Reddit says advertisers saw 17% lower CPA and 27% more conversions on average. Brooks Running saw 37% lower CPC and 27% more clicks during a 21-day Max campaign for its Ghost 17 running shoe.

This matters because Reddit already had intent. Now it is building the tools to sell against that intent.

Brand proof

Škoda: letting Reddit help build the product

Škoda is probably the cleanest Reddit case study because the brand did something many brands say they want to do, then rarely do well.

Škoda worked with Reddit’s biggest UK car community and invited users into the process for a new Octavia variant. Redditors test drove the car, gave feedback, and helped shape a special edition called "The Redditor Edit."

The results were strong: 255% more Octavia orders than expected, a 44% increase in website traffic, and CPC that was 58% more efficient than benchmark. During the campaign, the Octavia also became the number one car for share of conversation in r/CarTalkUK, with 23,000 mentions and 84% positive sentiment.

This is a clean case study where a brand treated the community as a product input, not only an audience to target. That made the campaign feel more native to Reddit because users had a real role in the outcome.

Jack Daniel’s: showing up where the decision was already happening

Jack Daniel’s used Reddit during the holiday season by targeting conversations around gifting, hosting, entertaining, and related communities. The campaign used interest, community, and keyword targeting.

Reddit and NCS measured the impact. The brand drove more than $5 million in incremental sales, 150% higher sales lift compared with NCS digital norms, 5 times higher ROAS than NCS digital norms, and 86% of incremental sales came from new, lapsed, or never-before buyers.

What worked here was timing.

Jack Daniel’s did not need to create the occasion from scratch. People were already talking about hosting, gifting, and holiday plans so the brand entered a context where decisions were already forming.

This is another good example of how Reddit can perform well: brands can use the platform to find (and then engage within) the communities where people are already comparing options, asking questions, and preparing to buy.

Tushbaby: parents were already asking

Tushbaby is another useful case because the category runs on peer recommendation.

Parents do not buy baby products in isolation. They ask other parents, compare use cases, and then they want to know what holds up when the baby is tired, the bag is heavy, and nobody has slept properly in four months.

Tushbaby used Reddit’s layered targeting and Dynamic Product Ads to reach new and expecting parents during product discovery moments. Reddit’s case study says the brand saw 84% higher ROAS compared with other competitive social channels, 40% lower CPA compared with other competitor social channels, and 52% lower CPA compared with its Reddit DPA goal.

The performance numbers are useful, but the environment is the real story.

Parents were already asking what carrier to buy and what was worth the money. They were already asking what other parents recommended. And then Tushbaby showed up while the decision was still open.

What Reddit actually asks of brands

Reddit is not an easy platform to clean up for a brand deck. And that is probably why a lot of marketers still underestimate it.

The main lesson is that Reddit should come earlier in the strategy process. This should be before the campaign line is locked, before coming up with the product story, and before the media plan turns community into another targeting bucket. The platform can show brands what people are already saying when they are not being surveyed, briefed, or sold to.

This is where its value sits. People use Reddit to compare notes. They ask what held up, what broke, what was overpriced, what sounded better online than it felt in real life. The comments are messy, but they are useful because they are specific. A brand can learn a lot from the sentence someone writes after owning a product for six months.

So, the takeaway is less about "being on Reddit" and more about knowing what role Reddit should play. Sometimes it is a research tool. Sometimes it can be a place to test a product idea. Sometimes it is where search demand gets validated. Sometimes it is where a brand can enter a conversation that was already happening without them.

The higher-level read is that Reddit rewards brands that understand the conversation before they try to join it. Brands have to listen first, learn the room, and then decide if they have anything useful to say.