Matt Turley, Continuum. Updated September 23, 2026.
Reddit marketing works when it does not look like marketing. Here is how to earn customers there without losing the account.
Answer real questions in threads where your buyers already ask, and say who you are whenever you mention your own business. Never DM someone first, and never use a second account or ask friends for upvotes. Keep your own business to roughly one comment in ten. The rest should just be useful.
When you mention your own product, put the disclosure right next to the mention. “I run this, so grain of salt” is enough. Do not bury it at the end.
It is also what keeps comments alive. One firm that tracks AI citations (MaxAEO) followed its own comments and found disclosed expert answers survived moderation 19 times out of 23, while earlier undisclosed promo comments survived 2 out of 11. Small sample, and it comes from a vendor, but the direction is hard to argue with. In the US the FTC's endorsement guides also expect you to disclose a material connection, and owning the company is about as material as it gets.
The threads worth your time are the ones whose title is the question your buyer types into Google or ChatGPT. Those are the threads AI engines pull in as sources, and they keep getting read for years.
We have seen it on our own account. A thread posted in r/AI_Agents got cited in a Google AI Overview because its title was nearly the same as the search. It did not have huge upvotes. It matched the question.
The cited threads we have tracked are small and old. For 12 Charleston trip questions, the 4 Reddit threads the engines cited had scores of 0, 3, 13 and 77, and were between 662 and 1,353 days old.
Reddit archives posts after six months by default, which locks comments. Moderators can turn archiving off, and some subreddits have. r/Charleston is one: a thread there from January 2023 is still open, so a good answer added today is read by every visitor who lands on it from search. Check before you write. If the thread is archived, move on.
Rules differ a lot and they change. When we checked in September 2026, r/Entrepreneur banned promotion and URLs and wanted you commenting on other posts before posting your own, r/juststart banned promoting your product or service, and r/AEO allowed recommendations but not repeated self-promotion. Five minutes reading the sidebar saves the account.
Answers on Reddit can show up in Perplexity within days, since it searches live. ChatGPT is much slower; the same tracking study saw changes land in 10 to 14 weeks. Plan on months, and judge progress on the fast engines first. For the bigger picture of where AI answers come from, see how to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT answers.
Getting named where your buyers ask is the job of Get Users, $1,200 a month, month to month. If Reddit is where your buyers are, we can talk through how it fits on the call, and nothing ever gets posted under your name that you have not read and approved.
Working against a date? The Deadline AEO Sprint is a two-week, $3,500 one-time sprint measured before and after on your own buyer questions.