Reddit: Navigating the Community

As platforms evolve and search becomes smarter 🤖, the spaces where real opinions live are gaining traction.

This week, Kate Brinkley, our Head of Digital Planning, explores Reddit’s rise in the UK, its growing role in AI-driven discovery, and what that means for Entrepreneurial Brands navigating a community-first, authenticity-led space.

Reddit's Rise 📈

Reddit is a space that’s hitting headlines at the moment. In the last week, it’s received a £14.5m fine from the ICO for data mis-use but before then it’s been cited for its rapid audience growth and regular AI citation. Following the release of Ofcom’s ‘Online Nations Report 2025’ it also hit headlines for having greater UK reach than TikTok, putting it in 4th place behind YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

This all makes for an interesting space that is getting onto brand radars.

It’s substantial growth (+28% monthly users YoY) has been driven by capturing new female and GenZ audiences. However, despite its reach, time spent is still significantly lower than most of the other key social platforms, including YouTube, FB, Insta, Tiktok, Snap and X. It suggests that a lot of those people are dipping in and out to sense check something it’s been cited for saying, rather than becoming heavily involved members of the Reddit community.

Reddit and AI: The Conversation Economy 🤖

Reddit is being frequently cited by AI – both in the AI overviews we are seeing on search results pages and wider LLM results. Reddit are looking to replicate this success themselves, developing their own AI search tool ‘Reddit Answers.’

It’s effectively an AI assistant layered on top of Reddit search, built to summarise relevant posts and comments into a concise, easy-to-read response – users can more quickly get a core summary of what users on the platform think of a topic or question.

Opportunity with Caution ⚠️

Paid advertising on Reddit should also be approached with some caution. It’s a less established platform for paid advertising than some of its closest competitors which throws us some challenges particularly around brand suitability.

Content is moderated by the communities, and many permit strong language and discussion of topics that could be brand safety risks. Honest discussion of brands is also widely encouraged resulting in negative reviews and experiences being prominently featured. The Reddit Ads platform offers very few features to control ad impressions around this type of content.

Third party verification technology (e.g. IAS or DoubleVerify) is better at preventing impressions alongside content that runs a clear brand safety risk but can still struggle to identify negative sentiment in an otherwise polite/well-written comment.

With these challenges in mind brands need to be honest about their attitude to risk and brand safety concerns – you are likely to come up against a minimum of negative comments. Can you take that on the chin and respond in a way that’s authentic and engaging?

Our Specialist View?

1. Start by listening: Reddit is rich in user opinions and thoughts – it’s a great place to understand what consumers think about your brand, product, as well as themes and trends related to your industry.

Understanding of subreddits and their associated norms to brands before you start posting also allows you to understand where you are relevant and can add value.

You might not want to go beyond this first use but if you do…

2. Engage with communities authentically: Find an honest and credible way to contribute to consumer conversations. Make sure you focus on adding value (help, insight, data, entertainment) vs selling. Future tools like ‘Reddit Insights’ that are currently in testing will help with this going forward.

3. Amplify with paid: Build out of the insights and positive engagement you have got from listening and your organic engagement testing. Focus on the ad formats that integrate you into real conversations, starting with a combination of Feed and Conversation formats before progressing into the more interactive formats like AMA (question format).

Keep your content relevant, mirror tone of targeted subreddits, and don’t make claims you can’t easily evidence. Format innovation is happening specifically to help with this – conversation summary ads that are currently in Alpha pull curated, positive Redditor comments that appear below your ad.

So, think before you jump in. Start with listening and learning before you begin actively participating (either from an organic or paid perspective). People are using the platform to get honest views and reviews from each other, not brands.

Reddit provides lots of opportunity, it’s a really tricky space for brands to navigate successfully and caution should be exercised.