Name: Capturing Demand in the LLM Ecosystem with G2
Uploaded: 2025-10-16T16:17:00.999Z
Duration: 1 h 56 s
Description: Capturing Demand in the LLM Ecosystem with G2

Transcript for "Capturing Demand in the LLM Ecosystem with G2": Hey there, everybody. Tim Sanders here with G2. We're going to let everyone else file into the event. We're gonna get started here in just a few minutes. Tim here again with G2, letting everyone file in, sharing their GIFs in the chat of how their week is going. We will start at three minutes after the hour. Glad you're here. Loving, loving, loving these GIFs. I want to welcome everyone to this webinar. My name is Tim Sanders. I'm the chief innovation officer at G2. We're so excited to have you, and I am personally excited to once again have a live conversation with my friend, the global head of insights at Reddit, Rob Gage. Rob? What's going on, Tim? See you again, man. Just can't wait to can't wait to have this conversation. As prop g likes to say, let's bust right into this. Let's do it. I I feel like in your role at Reddit, you have such a view of the playing field. And in particular, I know that you share a a a common curiosity as I do about b to b buyer journey. Mhmm. So set set the set the stage for us here. Talk to us about how you've seen the b to b buyer journey change over the last year or so. And in particular, talk to us about how AI chatbots like ChatGPT, have had an impact on the buyer journey and research habits. Yeah. Yeah. Great question, Tim. So I'll start by saying that what we're seeing is b to b conversations overall are up 366% year over year. So we are we are now being inundated, flooded with people coming to to view and ask questions in the b to b space. And when we look at the source, of those conversations and where people were before they got to Reddit, overwhelmingly, it is coming from search and l l m's. Meaning that those the search has been optimized to find those human conversations and it could be done then. To your point about, chatbots, what we're finding is that those chatbots have been excellent at highlighting the real helpful human conversations, which I know g two also specializes in. Those those authentic human experiences that too often, people were having difficulty finding, beforehand. And so they're they're seeking out places like Reddit, like G2. They're they're trying to find those, those real experiences to counterbalance the sales and marketing materials that they're finding in in the rest of their journey. So in your experience or at least, your personal experience, what are you seeing in terms of personal productivity between your traditional search method and your chat method? It's more personalized. It's it's faster. It's more nuanced. It's more, inclusive. You know, the fact that, an LLM isn't prioritizing based on overall spend, of a client, but is instead prioritizing based on helpfulness. It allows for smaller players to be seen in ways they never could have been before. It allows bigger players to be more nuanced and be more, frankly, more competitive in spaces where they may not have been immediately thought of. So we're we're seeing this kind of this leveling of the playing field, this expansion of the playing field, that is just really revolutionizing discovery, revolutionizing consideration, and making it super easy for people to all of a sudden find not just a generic solution to their problem, but a hyper specific solution to their unique circumstance. That's something that was really impossible to do before, I think. I'll play this back to you. So so when you think about traditional search, and I keep thinking about Clayton Christensen's book Innovator's Dilemma, Google cannot help but filter what you discover through a financial lens, at least partially. Uh-huh. It's just hard to avoid that. Right? You have to burn your boats to actually show people what you think is the best curated answer, not thinking about financial impact. Off script question here. There's a lot of buzz about different companies like OpenAI perhaps introducing advertising. Do you do you foresee that could potentially change what we find once advertising becomes a monetization path for ChatGPT? I think it's inevitable. Look. It it depends on their model, and I think you and I have talked about this in the past. Right? There's there's one model which is the the sponsorship wrapper, if you will. Right? Like, this message brought to you by whoever. That that that model, in some ways, trust is retained. Right? Yeah. And and and it it doesn't feel like you have a thumb on the on the scale. The other model is kind of what what Google has done all along of, you know, sponsored sponsored results. Right? Where where the blending there is a little less, obvious. And that's where, you know, it wait to see what model they pick or how they move forward, but that's where I think trust becomes problematic. If you can't really tell whether the thing it's recommending is because of a financial incentive or because it truly is the representation of what the LOM found to be the most helpful to your solution, I've the user gap there. And it's very interesting to me to see where the you know, what path to pursue. I don't know what your take on it. You know, here's what I think. I I think that if you look at history and how advertising has been introduced to platforms, you go all the way back to radio. Radio, this show was brought to you by turn of the century. That's the turn of the twentieth century. And then television was exactly the same. So television programs had presentation rights. They didn't have interruptive commercials. They ran without interruption as a matter of fact. I I anticipate you're right. And if I'm a guessing person, and as you know, I spend a lot of time guessing about OpenAI, I feel like the Pulse product that they've been experimenting with is a fantastic lead in to creating sponsored by advertising inventories. But those of you watching, they've experimented with a product called Pulse, and Pulse, kinda thinks overnight about everything you've been asking it, and it comes back the next morning, and it gives you a bunch of new ideas. It's been thinking. It's like one of those really smart friends of yours. It's like, oh, I've been thinking. I wanna show you five more things. That is gonna be a really good opportunity, Rob, to say today's pulse is presented by. I'll give you an example of where this historical approach actually still exists. I don't know what kind of sports you like, Rob. We haven't had the have we had the conversation? Yes. We have Dallas Cowboys. Oh, no. I don't wanna go there. Common source is coming in and disappointing. D DC, I threw and threw. I grew up in DC Commanders fan. I just live in the in the Southeast in the enemy territory here, but keep going. Alright. Well, that's alright. That's good. So when NFL RedZone, which is a very popular product, $99 a year, they introduced advertising. They had to be very careful about how they did it. They had to make sure there were no advertising breaks. They had to find some ways to lace it over the top of existing play, say, at a downtime and action. So I still continue to see, even in 2025, as media platforms introduce interruption, they have to do it very, very carefully to your point to retain trust. Hey. For everybody watching, before I forget, we will be doing a q and a at the end of this conversation. So if you look up over to your left, you see a little q and a button. Click that button, ask your question, and we will get to those questions here in a little bit. I wanna just press on one more thing. You mentioned trust. I like this. Mhmm. When you start blending results, some are sponsored, some are organic, you begin to lose trust. I think you're right. And I don't think as a person who was at Yahoo when this started, we bought a company called Overture. Google built their own AdWords. I was there at the very beginning of the concept of advertisers buying words. Right? In the very beginning, what we learned is there was some immediate value that sponsored links were less likely to be spammy and scammy than organic links because you had to have the money to buy the sponsored link, but that was a that was kind of a honeymoon period with it. And then you begin to see maybe a year or two years later, definite reactions amongst the users. I began to see some of the user data from my friends at Google, that found it interruptive, found it confusing, might have found it deceptive. We even saw brands buy predatory competing studio buy sponsored links to promote a different movie. So we saw all kinds of things happen. But but talk to me a little bit about why do you think that in 2025 with all this talk about hallucinations, why do you think the b two b buyer trusts an AI chatbot like they do? And and I'll I'll set this up for the viewers here. G2 latest survey, and we'll put a link here in the chat to a blog post about it, it indicated that half of all b two b buyers, even more than half of your enterprise, are starting their software research journey at a place like ChatGPT or Gemini instead of starting on Google. And then they said later, they actually trust that information more. Help me understand, Rob, how could that be in 2025? What's happened? Yeah. So like you, we've been, you know, doing a lot of research trying to understand what's happening there. And, we went in with the supposition, oh, people must not trust this. Why would you trust this? Everyone talks about hallucinations. And I think a funny thing happens when the the, the chat or or the, you know, the AI, the bot feels more and more like a friend, feels more and more human, starts remembering things about you, starts talking to things about you. I mean, you and I both read that one of the big, goals for OpenAI and ChatGPT is not just commerce, but also relationships. Right? That it wants it to be a relational, platform for you. Someone you could you could confide it. In fact, our research shows we looked at a variety of things that people would typically turn to a platform like Reddit for, and then we looked at, well, would you ever do, you know, an chat g p t or whatever. And, it's something like relationship advice. We would think, oh, there's no way. There's no way you would use that for a relationship advice. Overwhelmingly, 85% of them said they would. Right? Yeah. So I think there's something in the way in which it interacts that that engender stress. I also think the way in which it builds the summaries in a way that feels like, a navigator and less of, like, a definitive answer. If you look at the majority of the answers, specifically in the b to b space, what it's doing is saying, well, when people had these sets of considerations, they tended to lean here. When they had these different sets of considerations, they tended to lean there. And if you wanna or go here, go here, go here, go here. So it feels more like a like a friend who's a helpful guide, who knows lots of people. Kinda like your your buddy who's the the the Uber connected guy who knows a guy for everything. That's kinda how the GPT feels. It feels like it's your it's your buddy who knows exactly where to look or exactly who to talk to, to get the information you were actually looking for. And contrast that with search. And what do you see at the top? A bunch of sponsored things. Look, ah, they're trying to manipulate me. And then you see a bunch of articles that are never quite right, and you're getting frustrated. And you're like, well, the answer could be on page 56 of the results. Right. I'm gonna get there. Right? Yeah. All of that just changes the entire dynamic, and that's why we tend to think of trust, you know, we tend to think that there's a suspicion and mistrust, that honestly is misplaced. The people have moved past it, and now they're just excited about the results. Yeah. So much there. So much there. First of all, mimicry. So when you study the psychology of mimicry, when when when when a machine can communicate like a human and then personalize on the fly, it becomes rather endearing. People say to me, nope. That's not how I have that. Well, I remember once, when I was touring one of the movie studios, this is back when I was at Yahoo. I was, helping with the theatrical team, and we would go to different studios. And we toured a studio that had some memorabilia about the movie Star Wars, and they had this massive, massive box, and it was full of handwritten fan mail to c three p o. Mhmm. C three p o, a robot who had a darling British accent, spoke like a person. That to me was an early example of how mimicry can really fool people, or in this case cause a lot of people to believe that c three p o is a sentient human being. So I thought that was fascinating. For everybody watching, there's a there's a great book to read on this, and I just put a link to the to to the book in the chat. It's called Co Intelligence. It's by Wharton professor Ethan Malek, and it it talks about how our relationship with generative AI or chatbots is going to evolve over time. And he he he has this idea that we're not going to become cyborgs. We're gonna become centurions, and we're gonna be able to really augment, all of our capabilities with it. It's certainly much more of a friend than a threat. I think that's fascinating. But, you know, getting back to your point. So when we think about trust, I believe that for b to b employees who buy software, and if they're not in procurement, buying software isn't their job. It's a necessity. Yep. And they're at a company that might have had a reduction in force or maybe a hiring freeze or maybe they're not backfilling. What they all experience, this is why enterprise is more likely to abandon Google search. Their job scope is going up and they don't have much time. So when we talk about trust, what we're really talking about is trust you to value my time. Yeah. Right? So so I know that you have insights about the productivity that a person has finding answers on Reddit. Talk to us a little bit about how loyalty follows that productivity, that that yield per minute on the Reddit platform? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we've found time and time again is that when someone, finds an initial solution on Reddit, their likelihood of then coming back to do that over and over again, it is orders of magnitude higher. And so a lot of what you've probably seen, Tim, we've been investing in things like our Reddit answers product, our own version of an LOM to say, how do you navigate all the twenty two years that or twenty years, 22,000,000,000 posts and comments on Reddit? It's a it's a unbelievable amount of content. How do you navigate that faster? How do you find the the content you're looking faster? And when you do, they're, you know, orders of magnitude more likely to come back again and again and again. And it actually is complimentary with LLM. So what we see is that Redditors who use an LLM and then end up on Reddit go 42% deeper on the topic than people who don't. They are 19% more satisfied than Redditors who don't use an LLM at all, that they're essentially using the LLM to give context to a conversation, to show up informed to the Reddit conversation. I mean, one of the biggest, barriers to entry on Reddit is that the subreddits are really specialized. You have you know, I I like to joke. You gotta bring the thunder on Reddit. If you're gonna post or comment in a subreddit, especially a highly specialized one, you gotta know what you're talking about. Well, in your help, they get you real smart on a on a concept really quickly to allow you to ask a really intelligent question or drop you into a conversation where now you have the broader context, and you can really understand and take the the human experience away from that that, conversation in a much more efficient manner to your point. Yeah. You're just more educated, and therefore, you have a better experience. So that's what we're seeing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, on the G2 platform, we see that when someone comes to look at, a software solution and they came from a large language model, and then they make their way to the vendor website, they're 4% more likely to buy. There's more conviction. Right? So it feels like this answer engine has led them to believe more upon arrival that they're in the right place, and they and in your case of Reddit, they have more conviction to go deeper. In our case, they have more conviction, to buy. So I do think there's something going on there on the front end. I do wanna integrate right away a question. Patrick Cope has a question here about, statements we're making that go against what he's seeing in his company and, in other words, anecdotal experience that Patrick is having at his company against the data you and I both research for a living. So, I'll go first. So if I can have someone from my team put back into the chat just so it's at the very top, the link to the blog post, And if we could put that link in the chat right away. So so we did a blog post of our most recent pulse survey at the August. K. So the the end started at 4,600. We cleaned it down to just over a thousand to get a nice composition of large enterprise enterprise, mid market small business, and then represent major industries accordingly. And and that's where we got our data, that half of all b to b software buyers are starting. They they literally told us this in the survey. They're starting, on either ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Mistral, not AI overviews, not Google search. That's where they're starting the journey. And we did this survey in April with a similar end, and back then it was only 29%. So we saw a 71% spike in that user behavior that happened in four months according to the data. That being said, you know, 50% is not a 100%. So that for 50% of the business buyers, and this might be the case, Patrick, for you, they didn't start there. As a matter of fact, it started with Google. One of the things I saw is that the more you slant to SMB, the more you stick with traditional search, the more you slant to large enterprise, the more you begin to look for more productive tools. You know, see my comment earlier. Rob, talk a little bit about some of the data that you've gathered that's kind of informing some of your opinions, that you've been talking about earlier. Yeah. Absolutely. So we've done, some of our own custom studies across a number of different personas, Patrick. So, b to b, everything from Gen z, b to b buyers, you know, mainstream, across our seven major markets, that we work with. We've done that on our own. We've done that in combination with, with Magna, who's an IPG, company, and with Profound, who's one of the leading, LLM, citation, companies. And, you know, we could go one by one of each of the different claims or things. But, essentially, what we're seeing is that, things around trust seem remarkably consistent, whether I did the study myself or IPG did. That trust isn't really, the barrier. Your comments are around efficiency, Tim, relatively consistent. On the citation side, we've seen things around, where they start the journey and how they end up on Reddit, remarkably consistent. So happy to share some of that stuff after, Patrick, but, but that that's kind of the sources of of how we've we've done it, both on our own and then in common with others. As a as a researcher who these days is obsessed about AI agents, I research trust a lot, and I research the psychology of trust. And there's a lot of great work on, like, how do we form trust, how is trust broken. I find that, if you you could think about trust like a funnel. The top of the funnel are heuristics, little signals. Like, for example, Rob mentioned the blending of sponsored results with with natural results. That erodes trust at some point because it gives us these little signals. If you read the book, Malcolm Glad will blink, like, this little thing that tells us something here is not right. But what really erodes trust is bad results. So so you wasted an hour on Google. That will erode trust. So I always say that, you know, trust arrives on a mule, and it leaves in a Maserati. So even if you generate trust through design and placement, you can lose it very quickly by not respecting people's hunger for this concept I call return on attention. So, Rob, let's talk a little bit about traffic, website traffic. There's a lot of folks on this webinar, and and a big part of their business is not just capturing demand, but generating that front end of demand, which is website traffic. And we've been hearing from a lot of companies is that, you know, since the rise of AI search, everybody's traffic's gone down. And and and, you know, that's true. We're we're seeing with some of our research that, you know, if you were the number one result on Google, your CT your click through rate could be as high as 25%. And now it's only as high as 7%. Mhmm. That's it. Even the AI overview, if you're the featured result, you're less than 3% click through. So talk to us a little bit about what role large language models are playing now on website traffic for vendors. Where do you think it goes from here? Yeah. And it's getting even more challenging when you think about the recent changes for the pills, right, where where they've collapsed the sources and citations into one. So it'd be the top citation plus others. Right? So, so first, I would say, a 100%, that everyone across the board has seen their their website traffic going down. These models are still new. I would say we'll see how they optimize and how they change, but we've certainly read it, have seen that, you know, that our citation, while we we consistently are among the top, if not the top, it oscillates. It changes. They're still figuring things out, and and it's hard to know right now how much of that is their internal tinkering, how much of it is the model learning and and responding to user feedback. We just don't know. Right? And and so there is more that we'll have to learn there. I will say, though, that what this does is it it, I I I've been counseling my my, partners that it's it's really around the a you theory or, you know, where on the one hand, you now have to be in more places than ever. You need to know about what your footprint is across the board. So for instance, on Reddit, you need to be able to make sure that you are have a a foothold or a voice in all the suburbs that matter around your category. It's not good enough to simply drop in and out every once in a while, but you have to have a consistent voice across that wide base. And then when they do get to your own properties or your own, experiences, you have to make those experiences memorable. And I often am counseling them now. You need to make those experiences all memorable that people wanna go then talk about it on all these other sources. That's right. They spread that love. Because ultimately, they're not gonna immediately come to your your resource. They're gonna come somewhere else. And if those people are talking about how powerful that the the owned experience is, that's when they're gonna make the leap. They're not gonna come directly from the LLM. I mean, is that consistent with what you're saying? Very consistent because and it it really leads to the next question. So, you know, we've been doing a lot of research and and talking with our friends at ProFound, much like you do, about answer engines and what differentiates them from search engines. Right? So let's say that if we believe that Larry Page's page rank is still the DNA of search today, and I believe it is at the end of the day. Popularity, meaning, the most talked about kid, you know, that you went to school was the most popular person. They weren't they weren't popular because maybe they wanna vote. They were popular because the word-of-mouth, was so that's kind of how Larry Page always envisioned it. It's like if a bunch of people cite a link, the link will elevate with inside the page rank. Answer engines are different. Answer engines aren't about popularity. They're about the correct answer. In other words, they're about true utility as one researcher explained it to me. Meaning, when I go to chat g p t and I ask it for a turn by turn directions on how to build this carousel for LinkedIn in Canva because Canva is confusing me. It goes do this, this, this, and I built it, and it worked. That is the thing that an answer engine does that a search engine, or for that matter, a FAQ for a product is not doing to their satisfaction. So so what I understand, Rob, is that from a programming basis, like take chat g p t, which by the way, 47% of all the people in our recent survey said this is the thing I use every day. K? Gemini was, like, less than 20%. Copilot was number three. Okay. So this is a to me, I always talk about chat g p t. By the way, for those watching, perplexity was less than 4%. Anthropic was less than 3%. So I'm like, this is the chat g p t show. One of their researchers talked to me about this concept called the web of consensus. Mhmm. So when you see when you see a a a a the chatbot is either looking at its training data and its post training data, which is a whole separate conversation. When it's looking at its training data, it's also conducting web research. What it's trying to do is piece together a web of consensus, a series of signals that say from a variety of different confirmation sources, this recommendation is true, not this link is popular. So talk to me a little bit, you know, as these elements are trying to predict the next token, talk to me about different ways, and I think you touched on it, that a vendor watching this, their software could be in that web of consensus, not just because they've been promoting it, but because there's confirmation, that this is the right answer out in the real world. Yeah. I and, you know, I'll speak to it from the Reddit standpoint because that's what we've been studying. So we've done research with Profound, by the way, shout out to them. They are fantastic partners if you guys, are looking for, an LLM citation partner. But they've, some of that research has been really illuminating because our big question has always been we know Reddit is cited. That's fantastic for us, but which post and comments? How does it decide, what it begins? It's exactly what you're talking about. What it's trying to do is find things that are the most helpful, the quote, unquote best answer, the right answer. And there seem to be a couple principles that it's it's pulling from at least on Reddit. The first is that, 37% of the time, it is looking for posts and comments that have, language like best, favorite, most. It is looking for opinionated, cues. We see that consistently in in the data. So it's looking for people who have a strong view. It's often looking for ones that have a strong point of view and an opposing strong point of view, which is fascinating because that is how the LLM learns criteria. So what I was saying before, but we see a lot of times the LLM saying things like people consider this, choose this. People consider that, choose that. That's exactly the structure of what it's doing. So it's kinda rule number one. The second thing is it's looking at about three to five subreddits, on average. So 55 to 75% of the time, it, it returned only three to five subreddits. So out of the 100,000 plus active subreddits related, your or that it could pull from, it's pulling from a relatively small set of subreddits for a given topic. And then generally, we can subreddits tend to over index, in, a question and answer format. So when someone when when a a popular post in that subreddit is, like you just said, I'm trying to do this, help me. Or how do I do x on Canva? Or which CRM should I do for this situation? Those subrades tend to over index, in that in that fashion. And the reason why I think, we believe we don't know for certain, of course, because we're not on the inside here. But what we're seeing is that the for consensus building, it is that upvote and downvote feature that is helping it determine that this is the thing that works. So within a post, it could pull out any of the hundreds right I'll be there. But Reddit by its very platform nature says, well, this is the one that was the most helpful because Right. The community said so. So I think it's those three combinations of factors that are that are driving the consensus you're speaking of. So the Frontier Labs can crawl upvote, downvotes Yes. As part of your arrangement. So they see that data in addition to all the natural language tokens. Exactly. They they see all the data. They see the the comments. They also look at the, the depth of conversation around the topic, and it does prioritize post that have more comments related to it because it shows it's a a popular topic. Got it. Popular in in in different way than what you were saying around SEO, but but it shows that a lot of people believe that there's a there there for this topic. Yep. You know, at G2, we have a similar phenomenon where, you know, as the model's looking for right answer signals, they see reviews. So they see reviews and ratings. They also see grids where different companies are plotted on a grid based their criteria, and then that's all crawled much like it's crawled for you. Different different way for them to get to the right answer. But I think for those of you watching, you know, besides finding your way into those conversations on Reddit or G2, there's also a way to to begin to think about your user generated content and how your user generated content could have some type of signals in it as to better better, richer, more valuable conversations than others. So, I know you not never like to create your own competition, but there there's people watching watching here that have either current user generated content, maybe community boards and other things, so they're thinking about launching them. Give me just a few tips if you were trying to improve in this age of of AI search that you could provide the richest signals to an LLM to to show up then, in in the recommendation. Yeah. I think you can use some of the lessons from what we see with Reddit content and apply them to whatever user generated content you have. And so, again, the first thing we see is that, semantic match. So the question answer format, you can use, you know, company like Profound to say, well, what are the popular questions in my category? And how do I cure that language in my in my user communities? Right? The second thing is it it does seem to, like organized content, which can be challenging with user generated content because users often, you know, talk in a in a stream of consciousness or write in a stream of consciousness. But it does seem to prioritize lists, rankings, again, using terms like best, most. So thinking about that. Encouraging debate is another thing that we've seen, at least that it seems to prioritize Reddit content that does have different points of view. Interesting. It it we the hypothesis we, you know, we have is again that it's creating decision criteria, because we are kind of well, I think I told you, Tim, you know, the joke around, what's the best chocolate chip cookie. Right? Well, it depends. There's no one best recipe. But when you say, if someone says, I love sea salt on my chocolate chip cookie and someone else says no, that gives it a decision in criteria to help it understand, oh, there are different aspects of this that I can that are and I can highlight. So those are the the immediate And then there's a pharmaceutical brand that jumps in the thread and says, and we've got the best hypertension medicine. I'm just kidding. I kid I kid my friend, Rob. Hey. For everybody watching, we've referred to Profound. They're one of, the, answer engine optimization vendors, in our new category that we we launched, earlier this year for AEO. So, you know, click through on the link. There's a bunch of great companies there that can help you do everything from monitor how you're doing to improve, your results in AEO actions. Now we're gonna do a little bit of a deep dive on Reddit. Anyway, we're talking a lot about, like, AI search, but let's talk a little bit about signals marketers can look for to connect with for demand generation. We've got a lot of demand generation professionals watching here. What are some early signals versus signals later in the process that you see on Reddit, in particular, the buying journey? Yeah. So I I keep going back to this you know, for those of you who aren't as familiar with Reddit, I think, first of all, you should you should definitely get on Reddit at least for your category to understand, what's happening because you get this, because of the anonymity of the platform, you get this unfiltered truth of what people are really, really experiencing. You know, I'd say it like this. If you're, you know, a a mid level manager who wants to, you know, purchase a new CRM or something and you don't really know where to start, Reddit's one of the only places where you can admit that ignorance and not worry about it. You can't go on LinkedIn and say, hey, guys. I don't know what to do. Where should I start here? You'll, you know, you'll get real. And so what that allows for is a certain amount of honesty. What that also allows for though is this wonderful, ability to use social listening to to find the subreddits that really matter for your category and literally watch as the as the conversation and the questions evolve. And I'll use AI as an example. So a year ago, when we were when we were first, you know, studying how are people talking about AI, the first thing that happens, we saw that the where the AI conversations were happening migrated from highly technical or futurist subreddits into more functional subreddits. And that was our first clue that the the market was starting to get ready to adopt these tools and services. It started migrating from a place like r/futurist to, you know, r/marketingprofessionals where people are starting to say, hey. I'm trying to adopt this. What are the things I need to know? The second thing is by setting up listening within those spaces, you could start seeing how the questions evolve, how they evolve from a more generic topic or or or conversation into something more specific. So in the case of the marketing professionals, evolving from is anyone using this to how do I use this to how do I use this for creative without worrying my legal team that I'm stealing, you know, creators content. Right? Do I have to create my own creative, you know, training material? Can I use open open source training materials? How do I do that? You see that hyper specificity. And think about the power of that as you go down the line. You can start saying, okay. Now I know there's a new target for me to go after. Now I know there's a new place where I can put my marketing or advertising or or jump into an organic conversation. And then, obviously, changes because they're sharing with you your needs date. It changes specific, messaging. It changes for you how to go to market and what to say, how to position your product. And it gives you an early clue as to when you can change from, I would say an early adopter message to maybe a mainstream adoption message to then a laggard message. So that's kind of the counsel I've been giving people is set up that listening, watch the migration of the conversation, and then use your cues to adjust your your targeting, your positioning, your placement. So we've been talking a lot about people using AI search in their buyer journey. Having some fun with this, I asked myself, well, what would be a shortcut for me to do exactly what you just said, to listen deeply inside Reddit communities to find something? So I'm gonna put this here in the chat. Here's a prompt, and and and, of course, this was a meta prompt, where basically I went to, ChatGPT and said you're a professional demand marketing b to b researcher and or marketer, and and you're you're trying to to utilize tools, to be more efficient in finding the best Reddit communities for you to show up in. So here's here's the meta prompt, that it suggested. Of course, it wasn't delivered in good old fashioned markdown language like I like, but the idea here is that you don't have to I I heard Rob once a person said, well, I have to have a staff of six that are just like Reddit snooze. And I'm like, In 2025, I asked him, like, do do you still use the yellow pages, to buy things? What are some besides what I just showed here, what are some other ways that that a company can kind of be more efficient in identifying where on Reddit they need to be, contribute to the conversation, not spam, of course. But but talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah. So, I mean, the easiest way is we have a product called Reddit Pro. It is totally free to use. You do have to authenticate as an advertiser, but you don't actually have to advertise to use it. Right. It is designed to help you use social listening on Reddit. So it is optimized for, Reddit conversations, Reddit communities. You could follow keywords. It'll tell you what subreddits are most relevant for your category or for your competitors or for yourself. So that that set world of Reddit and really shrinks it down. The second is if you don't wanna do that or let's say you don't even have a social media team that that wants to to participate, honestly, Reddit Answers is fantastic. It's our own version of of of it. You know, it's our own LLM. Right? And you could do a prompt like that, and it is now trained on all twenty years of Reddit data. Got it. You know, basically tell you, here's where I would go. Here's where I would start on Reddit. And it's they're Reddit endemic, so it kinda understands our community than any of the other alarms possibly could. Sort of like Grock knows x better than anybody knows x. Without without Without yes. Without the unhinged answers. For those of you watching, we're just five minutes away from the q and a. So remember, the q and a button is up and to your left. Look at that little q and a button. Click it, ask your question. I see several questions already queued up, but I wanna do a follow-up to your last answer. So, you know, I do think that that as as they say in the original Spinal Tap, not the new one that came out, the original Spinal Tap. There is a fine line between stupid and clever. With that being said, what can brands do to build an authentic presence on Reddit? So I would say first thing, you gotta lurk and learn. You know, find the subreddit Lurk and learn. I'm gonna have to write that one down. You you you gotta you gotta listen. You know, I often I use it, like, the the the example I use is you gotta think of Reddit as, like, you're entering someone else's party. And, yeah, you you know, you you kinda got an invite to the party, but you're not the guest you're not the the guest of honor. You're not the star of this party. And just like any other party, you're not gonna walk into the room and just start shouting everything about yourself. Right? You're gonna listen to people. You're gonna meet people and and and and hear about them and ask them questions, and then you're gonna contribute thoughtfully and mindfully. And only then do you have permission to start telling stories about yourself. Subreddit communities act quite the same way. There have been people who might be in have been contributing to that subreddit for ten plus years. And while they're welcome and they did first of all, they definitely want brands to participate, so don't think that you cannot be there. But you can't just come in guns ablaze with your PR talking points and and hope to break through. A good example of this, there's this fun he's actually an arborist, if you can believe it, in Austin, Texas. And his company is called Tree Amigos, which I did love the brand first of all. Tree Amigos. Step. First of all, it's great. And and what he has done is, he goes into, Texas subreddits where people ask questions about plants, about trees, about whatever, and he just answers the questions. He doesn't market his services. That's right. He doesn't, promote himself. He's just like, oh, well, if you have a tree like this, you should consider this, that, and the other. Hey. Just a heads up. We're gonna get a cold snap. If you have a tree like that, you probably should do this or that or the other to protect it for Yeah. He's had value. And what he's seen over time is now his his Google search index is, like, is through the roof. He says he no longer has to do Google Ads because he's so highly indexed because of all his Reddit contributions. He's starting to MLMs. So now someone goes to an LLM and says, I need an arborist in Austin, Texas. Guess who comes up? That's right. Through no really just by doing good in the world. I mean, isn't that kind of a heartwarming thing? Getting back to the or what a marketing product is supposed to be is that you're solving real needs for real people, and that's what you credit. So that's in my mind. Chris Brogan, who was an early influencer in social media. He he co wrote a book called Trust Agents. And he had a saying that said the Internet rewards what the Internet likes. And I think, you know, you're kind of like talking a little bit about that. Or even if we go back a 100 before that, Dale Carnegie wrote in his great book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. He said, you will always accomplish more developing a sincere interest in people than trying to get people interested in you, which, by the way, was a quote that I shared with a buddy who started as director of marketing at an electronic music company called Electron. They made drum machines. These drum machines were frustratingly difficult to learn and integrate into workflow. It's, like, so difficult. I'm not saying that just because they're they're Scandinavian designed. I'm saying it was because they they tried to create a lot of constraints. The point was my advice to him was he wanted to do a lot of videos on YouTube and then buy a lot of YouTube advertising. I said, well, I like the idea, but what I think you should do instead, use Reddit as a place to help you understand which videos you need to create. Look for questions that keep coming up over and over again. Create the videos, publish the videos as a response to those questions thoughtfully. So they went into this cadence of creating hundreds and hundreds of very short videos that basically PreChat GPT answered the question. And to your point, it not only dramatically improved traffic from Reddit to their website to buy products and services, it also really improved their SEO because they kind of found a way to add value where value was being requested. And they they really focused on those those repeated Reddits where, you know, you get five people saying, I have a problem too. I looked everywhere. I can't figure it out. I've read the thing. I can't understand it. And it's like, great. We're gonna make that video, and they do it, like, on the spot. Yeah. So they said, this afternoon, we're gonna make five videos based on questions that keep coming up over and over again about this drum machine. So I think that's a fabulous way to think about it. One more question here before we head into the chat. By the way, if you haven't submitted your question yet, you might wanna do it. We're getting full here. The q and a button is over to your left. Rob, you and I have talked a lot, over over the time we've known each other about this shift from building owned audiences to partnership and syndication model. Now for those of you watching, this might make a lot of sense when you think about the the the web of consensus. Right? So so no single source of content is going to win the web of consensus. You're showing up being confirmed in multitudes of places as the right answer. Elaborate a little bit to this partnership syndication model approach. What would you recommend to people watching this program for how they can they can, enter into that world? Yeah. And, you know, it it really is stringing in a lot of the themes for what we've talked about today. The first is having, multiple touch points, multiple partnerships, multiple syndication, relationships because you have to be, you have to be in multiple places for that web of of consensus, like we've said. Another part is, changing your language from, keywords and and, categories to hyper specific problem and answers. So setting up the the the content to be, to be ready to be LLM index, to be ready to be to be categorized. And and it is going to be a semantic match between question and answer. So thinking about your your point about the YouTube videos is spot on. Like, that is the the way to think about it. But just now you're gonna have to do that through a multitude of places. Because the reality is the element is gonna always prioritize those consensus building platforms over your website or over your branded space. It's just we we've seen that. It will still prioritize, editorial and and, you know, quote, unquote professional sources as well. In fact, nine out of 10 times that Reddit is cited, it is cited alongside a professional source, just so you know. So using Mhmm. So don't give up those partnerships or those, you know, any comms people out there. You definitely, a 100%, should be doubling down on those relationships because they will show up alongside your, you know, your your more human or, you know, the user generated content. But, yeah, that's my advice. Go wide, get specific problem solution, and and open yourself up to vulnerability because I think the other thing, again, debate is is, it drives the whole end results. They wanna see some debate in there. And so don't get so just if someone else has a different point of view, it's actually okay. But that means, you know, your your social media manager needs to let go a little bit and allow for people to disagree. Don't delete comments you don't like. As opposed to spam, I could see deleting a spam comment, but I don't delete comments that you that you don't like. You'll be yeah. It's gonna do more harm than good. Yeah. So one quick follow-up here. We're gonna head to the q and a. I promise. So everybody's as I am excited about agents, agents are a great automation tool. Tell us three things not to do with agents on Reddit. I'm just I know this wasn't what we talked about, but I just have to imagine that some people are are configuring agents as we speak to do a lot of the things we just talked. Tell me three things that you do not recommend, and I mean it from a authenticity standpoint, effectiveness standpoint, not like we'll come get you and put you in Reddit jail, which I understand is a a rather large a rather large facility in California. We we, don't try to hide your bot. Don't try to pretend that, like, this is a real person and it's not a real person on Reddit. First of all, Reddit will always find you out, and second of all, you you will get in trouble. So definitely don't do that. Mhmm. Do not, spam or cross post the same content over and over and over across a variety of different places. Not help. Not useful. You need to be high specific for the community community that you're in. You know, and I'm I'm just gonna say it. Also, Reddit is not free training data. So if if you want to to train your agent on Reddit, let's have a conversation. Right? Like, this is, it is incredibly powerful data. But if you go out and try to say, I'm just gonna, you know, build an agent that's trained on this stuff without going through the appropriate, steps, it's gonna get shut down and then you're gonna be starting back from zero. So do it the right way. Reach out. We'll help you build it. I think that's just some obvious advice. And how can they reach out? I know that I'm putting you on the spot here. Is there some part of Reddit maybe they would go to? Yeah. Yeah. If you go into just, the Reddit for business, there there's a link there, that you can see if you wanna talk about data sharing and everything. And I'm sure somebody from my team is gonna find that and put it in the chat. I'm gonna put Sarah's giving me the thumbs up. Let's go to the first question from Caroline Egan. She says, one of the bigger challenges I face with Reddit is someone who would want our SMEs to contribute is moderators who might actually be competitors and thus have become complete owner of the topic. How do we overcome that? Or a 100% shut out because of someone that created that subreddit years ago? Good question. What's the answer here, Rob? Yeah. So first of all, that is something we absolutely acknowledge and and we are looking at trying to find ways in which businesses can have a space in Reddit, but that more, I think, more fairly aligned with how businesses need to operate. Right? So Yeah. You should have someone just sitting on your brand name as an example. Right? And so we are looking into solutions broadly about how we do that. In the short term though, I would say, there are so many subrids and there are many other places to to go, that would allow you for that that contribution. You can always flag if you think that a moderator is being unfair to you and and we do have processes in place to evaluate it as you know, the reality is it's their space. And so Yep. They don't want you to play there. You gotta go somewhere else where you are allowed to play. Let's go to a connected question. Matanji asked this question on a similar thread to Caroline's question. Most of our SMEs have their own personal profiles, don't wanna be affiliated with our company. Okay. Nor do they wanna have the bandwidth, to maintain a new Reddit profile for us. What's the best way to navigate this? Yeah. So, Reddit Pro allows you to have an official, corporate, entity. So, it'll be verified. Everyone I know is officially, from you, and and it is you. It's up to you how you wanna manage how other people in your company Sure. Wanna do that. But, our our take is always start with your own branded one, have someone in your Yep. Media team run that and and allow them to be the official face of your brand. K. So let's think one's got six votes. I didn't say upvote because, again, I don't wanna violate your IP. He's got six votes. Andrea Miller, how long does it take to build up trust and community, as a b to b brand dipping our toe into Reddit and looking for outcomes like being surfaced in AI overviews adding measurable value? I know it's a marathon, not a sprint, but I wanna set I like this question. So so help them understand how how to think about the Yeah. So up here. Yeah. You're not gonna like this answer, but it depends. Right? It depends on, like, what what is the competitive, set that you're dealing with. I mean, Tree Amigos was able to bust through in no time because how many people are talking about, you know, tree care in Austin. Right? It was a it was a white space. Right? So it does depend. That said, I we've seen brands in, relatively shorter, we're talking months, start seeing, a more positive engagement with posts and comments. That's the first thing to look at. When you post your comment, are you getting upvoted? Are you getting downvoted? Are you getting more views or less views? Start with comments, by the way. I I should have said that at the beginning. Start by commenting on people's posts and work your way up to, posting. And then you should start seeing over time that you're posting volume or I'm sorry. When you post that the engagement with that you could see all this in Reddit Pro, by the way, all of these, these data points. K. You start seeing the engagement in that post go up. You should start seeing views to that go up. And then over time, what you should start seeing is organic positive mentions. And now I say over time, the general rule of thumb here is if you're not seeing an increase of positive organic mentions, within three to six months, you're probably, not contributing the way you think. And what I mean by positive organic mentions is let's say you've answered a question in the past about something, and then later on someone asks that same question six months from now, are you included as the answer? Are people saying, well, just like someone so said from this company, you probably wanna try that. That that's the certain before. But just remember, Reddit is not a people don't mention a lot of brands on Reddit all the time. So you you're not gonna see, you know, thousands and thousands of mentions. It's probably in the tens or hundreds. Right? But More likely to be at the user level. Right? Yeah. Makes sense. Here's a fascinating question. Georgie Kemp asks, in you know, inspired by Tim's note. That's not why I picked it. I picked it because it had three votes. What are your thoughts on video formats shaping discoverability, visibility, both in search, Reddit, and the LLMs. I'm fascinated about this. I debate it myself between, you know, traditional, either portrait or horizontal natural four by three video, where you can have more more real estate or now reels. You know, we've lost the war against vertical video. What what do you think? What what what are your thoughts on video formats shaping discoverability and visibility? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, YouTube is, among the top three most cited sources as well. Right? So clearly, clearly, it's, in in in our conversations with all of the major LLMs, they're all prioritizing, the video's credibility and understanding. Right? So we know that that's the future. The Internet is a video first future, I believe. I don't feel free to. I do. I do well. I actually think it's it's video, it's voice. I I think I think our interface, but it's a whole separate conversation. I think our interface to computers is gonna be is gonna be like what you and I are doing now, but I also think where we learn is gonna be visual increasingly. A 100%. So I I I think, to your point, it is the future of where this is going. That said, LMs are still better with text right now. It's just easier. Right? It may it makes it, more indexable. It makes it more findable. So, yeah, I think it's the future. So let's talk a little bit about YouTube being cited. Are we talking about YouTube actual video links, or are we talking about reels? Because I find that fascinating that I see a lot of links to YouTube videos. I I haven't really seen links to reels. I just see reels. I I just see the videos as well. I it'll be fun to to talk to our profound guys to see if they could separate the two and and see what that is. I haven't dug into that. But, yeah, my experience is at least, again, I'm looking at through the lens of Reddit because that's what I'm obsessed with day in day out. And when we see us alongside, a YouTube, it's usually, like, let's take fix my sync. Right? The redditor is talking about the the, you know, the the experience of fixing the sync and the YouTube is showing the step by step motion. Right? So there's a nice one two punch there that seems to seems to work really well. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Because we we we we love reels because you get the likes. You get the engagement. Sometimes you get the distribution and carousels, but but I'm not sure it's goes beyond just like, you know, brand exposure. For those watching and by the way, what what somebody from my team do this too. I wanted to put my, my LinkedIn here for folks. We post a lot of this research there. Do follow me there. If somebody from my team can also put Rob's LinkedIn in the chat here. Gabriel Emmanuel has a question. How do customer stories slash case studies fit into Reddit LLMs? Are they still relevant? Really good question. Really good question. So organically, a 100%. So if if, a customer posts in there a good or a bad experience, it is being gobbled up and the LLMs love it. They it's like catnip for them. And and and it's again, because usually that is coming from a quest that question answer format. So we'll see the question. Someone will ask the question and someone will say, well, in my experience, this happened to me. Right? Those seem to be be, we see those disproportionately represented in our citation volume. We don't see as much of someone just transparently saying, I just had the worst experience with blank tel telco. Right? Like, we don't see that being, because I think the LOM is looking for the question. Right? And that's that's our supposition. Interesting. That said, what we're looking into is how do we allow a branded space so the brand can create space of of highlighting those case studies and the things that they've done great. Right now, if if you were a a b two b brand and you went to a a relevant suburb and just said, hey. We just launched this new case study. Come see how so and so increased ROAS by adopting my product. It doesn't seem like that. But that first of all, the the community would probably be like, what are you doing? Why are you marketing to us that way? And then so it'd be downloaded. And then second of all, the LOM wouldn't pick it up. So we wanted to create a branded space for, for that relevant content and then allow an organic connection point. So imagine now someone has this question or problem and you could post and say, you know, that's interesting. We had a customer go through the same thing. If you wanna add it, click here, and then it goes to a place in Reddit that's already indexed by the LLM. That that's the thing we're seeing or that we're in thing. I love that answer because you do not wanna post your pre prepared customer story case study there. It will get absolutely flamed if they still use that word. However, if you have if you have a cohort of customer evangelists, if they went and said, let me tell you what my personal experience was with the product, now that could get upvoted. So it feels like an extra step, but for customer marketers listening today deploying authentically happy customers into authentic conversations, would would that be better in your world, Rob? A thousand percent. Yeah. In fact, what we're experimenting with, how do we create campaigns that incentivize that sort of behavior? How do we get people to share their positive source? Because, look, most of us out there, you guys are are are producing really great products that people have really great experiences with or else you wouldn't be in business. It's just, you know, we're not in as humans I don't know. We tend to have a bias for sharing the stuff that's bad. Right? And how do you give them 5%. Right? Yeah. How do you give them the opportunity to share their great stories? Where do you give them the space to do that or That's right. We're experimenting with that. Everybody watching here, you know, you've been doing this for, well over fifteen years, you know, as Johnny Rose says on Schitt's Creek, follow us on tweeters. You've been getting people, like, post reviews on Yelp. You've been getting people to follow you on Facebook. So now if you say, hey. If you've had a great brand experience with our product, here are some subreddits that are discussing the product, and maybe there's somebody on the fence that you could help. Subtle, redirect some of that energy feels like a better way to go than you just going and doing that yourself. Thousand percent. Couldn't agree more. Same with G2. I mean, you guys are the the epitome of a a great place to put good customer feedback. You know? Well, thank you very much. We're actually gonna quote you, now. If we do a picture and do that, you have to kinda wait past this quiet period, but we're gonna definitely post you, with that with that cosine, as Kendrick likes to call it, a cosine. Mhmm. In ending ending on that note, we've come at the top of the hour, if not past it. And, we just wanna thank everyone for for coming. And, Rob, I just wanna thank you. I, every conversation is fire, and we've done it again. So thank you very much for coming, Rob. And for everyone that came here today, thank you for your time. Yeah. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure.