“YouTube is the world’s most cited domain today, followed by Reddit.” That is Mustafa El Bermawy, founder of the AI visibility platform Goodie, on The GEO Blueprint podcast. Two domains sit at the top of the citation tables across AI engines, and one of them has a comment box.
The comment box is where the strategy dies. The obvious move, paying someone to blanket your category’s subreddits with brand mentions, fails in a specific and observable way: the posts get deleted. Ethan Smith, whose agency Graphite ran Webflow’s AEO program, is flat about it on Lenny’s Podcast: mass-spamming Reddit does not work and gets removed. Reddit has moderators, and the moderators have read your agency’s playbook.
His prescription inverts the volume assumption. Find the threads that are already citations in AI answers. Post there, under a real name, with a disclosure, saying something a buyer would find useful. His sizing of the effort: “even five comments could be great” (Lenny’s Podcast). This is the play Graphite ran for Webflow, the same program where Webflow’s LLM traffic converted 6x better than its Google traffic and LLMs grew to 8% of signups (Lenny’s Podcast). Five comments is not a typo. The leverage is in the thread selection, and almost nobody selects.
Which Reddit threads do AI engines cite?
Threads that look like the question, answered. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s founder, gave the checklist on My First Million: a cited thread is a question-post whose meaning matches the prompt, carrying a definitive answer the community upvoted. The engine is doing something close to matching a buyer’s question against a thread titled with that question, then lifting the reply that won the votes.
The corollary does the real work. A thread that is adjacent to your category, or a question-post with a messy 40-comment argument and no accepted answer, earns nothing. The stakes are binary at the answer level too: Shah’s framing is that AI answers list 2 to 4 options against Google’s endless pages, and “if you’re not in the citations, you’re literally at zero” (My First Million). A cited thread that omits you is a stocked shelf without your product on it.
How do you find the threads that are already cited?
Ask the engines your buyer questions and read the citations. The procedure fits in a morning:
- Write 5 to 10 questions your buyers ask before they know you exist. Sales calls and support tickets beat brainstorms; the sourcing method is in our prompt-count post.
- Run each question through the engines with web search on. Run them more than once: citations shift between runs, which is the variance problem in miniature.
- Collect every cited URL. Keep the reddit.com ones. Dedupe.
What remains is a short list of threads that the engines have already decided to trust for your exact questions. Our free scan runs step 2 for you: 5 buyer questions, citations shown verbatim, and any Reddit URLs in that output are your target list. Run it here. We built the scan to show citations because the citation list is the actionable part; the mention count is the scoreboard.
What does a comment that survives look like?
A real name, a stated affiliation, and an answer that would still help if your product did not exist. Compare tools by their trade-offs, including where yours loses. Answer the follow-up questions in the thread. Disclosure reads like a handicap until you notice which comments vanish: the undisclosed ones, in batches, when a moderator gets around to it.
The order of operations matters more than the wording. Thread first, comment second. A perfect comment on an uncited thread is charity work for that subreddit. A useful, disclosed comment on a thread the engines already cite sits inside the source material for every future answer to that question. Five of those beat five hundred of the other kind, and you can count the required effort in evenings.
Start with one question. Ask an engine, find the Reddit thread in the citations, and read it as a buyer would. If the top answer already covers you, move on. If it names your competitors and skips you, you have found the highest-leverage comment box on the internet this week.