SEO
At $50+ CPCs, Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time across 8,566 keywords.
The study from Ross Simmonds and his team focused on B2B SaaS, but the underlying dynamics don’t stop there. The higher the advertising competition on a term, the more likely a Reddit thread sits above every brand in organic results.
If you’re in legal, financial services, premium home services, or insurance, those CPCs aren’t unusual territory. This study is worth your attention.
The SEO community has been talking about this for a while, and the conversation has largely stayed in SEO territory: Reddit is eating organic search, so build your glossaries and invest in content strategy. These are great suggestions, but I’m not an SEO, so I can’t speak to them.
What I keep thinking about isn’t mentioned in the study: What does this actually do to the signal layer your PPC campaigns depend on?
The problem starts before anyone clicks your ad
When a buyer searches a high-intent term and lands on a Reddit thread instead of your page, two things happen.
- The buyer gets peer opinions, real comparisons, and experiences from people who’ve already been where they are.
- Google records a behavioral signal: someone searched this query, engaged with this result, and didn’t need to go further.
That signal feeds back into Google’s understanding of what satisfies that query, and over time, it shapes how the algorithm models relevance on that term.
Your page didn’t just lose a click. It contributed to a pattern of signal degradation on a term you’re actively paying to compete on, originating entirely outside your account, with no report that surfaces it.
This is what makes it an automation drift problem. The algorithm is updating its model based on the behavioral data it can see, while your account operates in the dark about where that data is coming from.
Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Start Free Trial
Get started with
The problem continues after someone clicks
The buyer who spent three days on Reddit before clicking your ad arrives as a different person than someone who searched and converted in the same session. They’ve compared options, read real experiences, and already filtered out most of the noise.
Smart Bidding has no idea any of that happened. It sees a $50 click and waits to see if a conversion fires within your attribution window.
If you’re running a short window and the buyer spent several of those days in a research phase before coming back, you’re looking at 100% of the cost and none of the conversions still sitting in that detour.
The system interprets this as underperformance and starts pulling back on the exact terms producing your most qualified buyers, not because anything went wrong inside the account, but because the signal it was given told it to.
The automation is doing exactly what it was built to do. The signal just doesn’t reflect the full picture of what’s happening.
What UCaaS gets right that others don’t
Simmonds’ study covers four verticals. In three of them, Reddit beats every vendor simultaneously on more than half of shared keywords.
In the unified communication and contact center as a service (UCaaS) category, the vendors win. RingCentral, Nextiva, and Dialpad consistently outrank Reddit on the same terms where every other vertical loses.
It’s not because of domain authority or budget. It’s that they built informational content at scale years ago — glossaries, category explainers, how-to-choose guides — and never stopped. Google had something real to point to on those terms beyond an ad, and the behavioral signals on those queries reflect that.
That’s a content investment conversation, and a worthwhile one. But the principle connects directly to the bidding side: the algorithm makes better decisions when the signals around a term are cleaner, and cleaner signals don’t happen by accident.
Dig deeper: A smarter Reddit strategy for organic and AI search visibility
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
Where the fix lives
On the bidding side, offline conversion tracking is the mechanism that closes the gap.
When you import downstream outcomes back into the algorithm — which leads qualified, which closed, and what they were actually worth — you give Smart Bidding the context it needs to understand that a longer, more research-heavy path at a higher CPC can still be the right outcome.
Google’s own data shows a median 10% lift in conversions for advertisers using first-party data alongside click IDs for offline measurement. Without it, the system keeps optimizing toward the fastest path to a conversion, which is rarely the path your most informed buyers take.
On the organic side, getting more intentional about where your business shows up in the conversations your buyers are already having is worth considering.
That might mean investing in content that actually answers the questions Reddit threads are currently answering for you, or thinking about whether your business has a presence in the communities where your buyers are doing their research.
The UCaaS vendors didn’t beat Reddit by outspending everyone. They beat it by showing up consistently in the right places with the right content, long before anyone was ready to click an ad.
The terms where you’re spending the most are the same terms where Reddit is most likely sitting between your ad and your buyer, quietly shaping the signals your automation depends on.
That’s what automation drift looks like when it starts entirely outside the account.
Dig deeper: Stop chasing Reddit and Wikipedia: What actually drives AI recommendations
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
