Reddit as the keyword research tool nobody uses

Almost every conversation about Reddit and SEO over the past two years has revolved around participation: posting, commenting, seeding threads, creating subreddits. An article by Dan Lauer on Search Engine Land argues these are the wrong questions. The real value lies in treating Reddit as one of the largest public repositories of ranking data in the world, a map of search intent already sorted by what Google has decided to value.

The logic is straightforward: when Reddit outranks your site for a query, it means a real person asked that question using the words real people actually use, other people answered, and Google judged that exchange the best available answer. According to Lauer, you can't replicate the forum format, but you can answer the same question better, on a domain you control.

Why Reddit's footprint got too big to ignore

The numbers the article cites, based on Semrush data from August 2026, give a sense of the scale: reddit.com ranks for roughly 166 million keywords, with more than 10 million in first position, 31 million in the top 3, and 65 million on the first page. More than 35 million of those keywords trigger AI Overviews, and Reddit is cited in more than 15 million of them, a citation rate of 46%. The estimated organic traffic reaches 440 million monthly visits.

Two commercial deals drove this growth. In February 2024, the same day Reddit registered its IPO, a partnership with Google was signed, estimated at around $60 million a year, giving the search engine real-time access to content via the Data API. Three months later came the deal with OpenAI, valued at around $70 million annually, feeding ChatGPT with fresher, more conversational content.

There's an important caveat in the piece: in July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit was considering not renewing its deal with Google, even weighing restricting structured AI access, because AI Overviews are eroding referral traffic. The stock dropped about 9% on the news. The practical takeaway is that Reddit's SERP dominance depends on arrangements that can change, which is why it's worth mining this data now.

What changes for those publishing technical content in Brazil

The interesting angle for Brazilian devs and tech leads is to use Reddit as an intent layer ahead of Google. That's where people write questions in the raw language they actually think in: "is [tool] worth it", "[product] vs [competitor]", "why did [feature] break". For software categories, SaaS, and topics with an opinion-driven purchase process, Reddit probably already outranks your site on hundreds or thousands of queries.

But Lauer himself is honest about where this doesn't work. In highly specific, regulated, or highly technical B2B niches, Reddit's influence tends to be weak or limited: the conversations exist, but they're small and Google doesn't rank them. In these cases the analysis will produce a thin list, and the message is to spend your time elsewhere, though it's worth doing the analysis precisely to find that out. The recommendation: before building any plan, spend 30 minutes running a Domain Overview on two or three of your non-brand topics and look at the raw count.

The method, step by step

The process relies on Semrush (which, worth noting, owns Search Engine Land) and basically uses two reports: Domain Overview and Keyword Gap.

Step 1, non-brand rankings. In Domain Overview, type reddit.com and open Organic Research. In Advanced Filters, set Include → Keyword → Containing with a non-brand term tied to your products, one core topic at a time. Apply a position filter of Top 10 and export to Excel. If the list is huge, tighten it to Top 3; if it's thin, loosen it. Repeat for three to five core topics, no more than that on a first pass.

Step 2, the AI Overview layer. This is the step most people skip, and the one that pays off most in 2026. Still in the same report, remove the position filter, open the SERP Features filter, go to SERP Features on SERP, and select AI Overviews. Export. You now have every query in your topic where Reddit appears in a SERP that also generates an AI summary. Lauer suggests using this export as raw material to test the same prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to see if your brand shows up.

Step 3, the brand pass. Filter by your brand name and your competitors'. This usually returns two kinds of things, both useful: bottom-of-funnel support content ("does the product work with such integration", "how to cancel") and comparison content ("[your brand] vs [competitor]", "alternatives to [competitor]"). If Reddit ranks for "does product X work with Y" and your help center doesn't, in the author's words, "that's not a Reddit problem."

Step 4, the Keyword Gap. Put your domain in the first field, add reddit.com as a competitor, both set to Root Domain and Organic Keywords, and compare. Click the Weak tab, filter competitors to Top 10, and export. The Weak tab matters more than Missing: missing keywords are speculative, you have no proof you can compete for them; weak keywords mean Google already considers your page relevant enough to rank, so you're closing a gap from an existing base, not starting from zero.

What to do with the exports, and what this isn't

The four files become a topical map. Grouping by theme and intent and comparing against your current content, three buckets emerge: optimization candidates (you rank, Reddit ranks better, and the fix is usually depth and specificity in long-tail qualifiers); net-new creation (Reddit ranks and you have nothing, prioritized by cluster density rather than individual volume, since twenty related questions with modest volume are worth more than one head term); and FAQ and support (quick to produce and disproportionately effective for AI citation).

The point that closes the argument: none of this involves posting, commenting, or seeding content on Reddit. That's a separate and risky discipline, because communities are especially good at detecting and punishing brand astroturfing. The exercise is pure keyword intelligence, reading the map Reddit has produced over two decades of real people answering real questions, and answering better on your own domain. As a follow-up, the author suggests adding reddit.com as a competitor in Semrush's Position Tracking and, if you have prompt-level visibility monitoring in tools like Peec AI, there too.