The enterprise software deal your team just lost?
There’s a good chance the winning vendor was chosen in a Reddit thread six months ago.
Nothing in your Salesforce instance recorded it. Your attribution model didn’t flag it. Your SDRs never saw it coming…
Reddit is now the third most visible website in Google Search, behind only Wikipedia and Amazon.
It shows up in 97.5% of product review queries. And 72% of tech decision-makers use it when evaluating software purchases…
And this is according to Forrester. Not just me. The guy who wrote a book about Reddit more than 8 years ago…
But it makes sense. More than 2 years ago, I started to track the organic visibility of Reddit vs review sites in software. The writing was on the wall then but people weren’t yet believers that Reddit could actually influence B2B buyers. Well… Look at how things changed:
None of this activity shows up in your CRM.
It doesn’t trigger a lead score. It doesn’t get credit in your attribution reports. It just…
Quietly shapes which vendors make the shortlist and which ones get ghosted after the first demo.
This is the dark funnel. And Reddit has become its center of gravity for enterprise software.
Let me share with you some data points worth noting:
- Reddit’s search visibility increased 1,328% between mid-2023 and mid-2024. This was the largest surge for any website in the history of Google Search..
- 72% of tech decision-makers use Reddit for peer reviews when evaluating products (Forrester, 2025)
- 70% of the B2B buying journey happens anonymously before a prospect raises their hand (6sense)
- Reddit is the #1 most cited domain by both Google AI Overviews and Perplexity when answering software-related queries
- 68% of Reddit users aren’t on LinkedIn… This is an audience most B2B marketing strategies miss entirely
The concept of the “dark funnel” has been kicking around B2B marketing circles for a few years now.
The core idea is simple:
Most of what influences a B2B buying decision happens in places your marketing analytics can’t see.
The data backs this up pretty aggressively.
6sense surveyed over 4,000 B2B buyers in 2025 and found that 61% of the buying journey is done before a buyer contacts a single vendor. Gartner estimated buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase time with potential suppliers. The rest happens in conversations, research, and evaluation that your CRM will never know about.
The rest happens on Reddit. Especially since something happened that changed the trajectory of Reddit forever…
The partnership that changed the industry:
Google & Reddit’s $60M partnership changed everything.
Sure…
Google’s Helpful Content Update in August 2023 started shifting visibility toward forums and user-generated content. The “Hidden Gems” update in November pushed this further. But on February 22, 2024 (and the timing here is almost comically perfect) Reddit filed its IPO and announced a $60 million annual deal with Google on the same day…. Google would pay Reddit for access to its data API to train AI models.
And Reddit would get access to Google’s Vertex AI platform.
But what else happened?
Well…
Reddit’s monthly organic visits from Google jumped from 57 million to 427 million.
Its U.S. daily active users doubled from roughly 56 million to 121.4 million.
The site went from #78 to #3 in overall Google visibility, leapfrogging YouTube (I’m not convinced that lasts) and Facebook. For enterprise software specifically, the impact was even more dramatic. Reddit overtook every single B2B Review site in the SERP and their traffic plummeted to the depths of the internets basement.
So why would Google do this?
Well…
Over 58% of Reddit users say the platform is more trustworthy than Google for finding honest answers.
Not “as trustworthy.”
More trustworthy.
Why a sysadmin’s Reddit post outranks your $50K analyst report
There’s a trust crisis in B2B software buying, and the data on it is stark.
Forrester surveyed buyers in 2023 and found that 90%+ trust peers in their industry completely or somewhat. Customers of vendors? 85% trust. Coworkers and management? 82%.
Vendor sales reps? 29%.
Twenty-nine percent.
Unlike G2 or Capterra, where reviews can be incentivized (and 73% of buyers suspect they regularly see fake reviews), Reddit threads feature raw conversation between practitioners.
The platform’s community norms actively suppress promotion… Post something that smells like marketing and you’ll get downvoted into oblivion or removed by moderators. The anonymity lets people speak freely about their actual experiences without worrying about professional blowback from a vendor they still need to work with.
The result is a platform where a sysadmin in r/sysadmin (750,000+ members) will post a detailed, 2,000-word account of migrating from one SIEM platform to another, including hidden costs, support nightmares, and specific failure modes. That thread will get hundreds of replies from other practitioners sharing their own migration stories. Google will surface it for queries like “best SIEM platform 2025” or “CrowdStrike vs SentinelOne reddit.” And an entire buying committee across three different companies will read it over the next six months, each member independently, none of them creating a trackable touchpoint in any vendor’s CRM.
Speaking of CRM… At this moment, the top ranking content for “best CRM” is a Reddit thread:
The enterprise software subreddits where these conversations happen are massive:
r/sysadmin has 750,000+ members discussing tool selection, vendor comparisons, and implementation war stories. r/cybersecurity has 700,000+ members evaluating security platforms. r/devops has 347,000+ members comparing CI/CD tools and infrastructure-as-code solutions. r/networking has 348,000+ members running through firewall reviews and product shootouts. r/SaaS has 336,000 members giving direct product feedback.
These aren’t casual browsers.
These are the people who actually implement, manage, and live with the software every day.
When they say “we evaluated six endpoint detection platforms and here’s what we found,” that carries more weight than any analyst quadrant because it comes without a consulting agreement attached.
The attribution black hole
So if Reddit is this influential, why doesn’t it show up in marketing attribution?
It’s because the influence is less obvious than you think. We live in a world where these buyers are no longer just using Google to make decisions around what to buy. buyers are actually using LLMs to support them throughout the entire buyer’s journey, but not just LLMs. Some people are more likely to go to Reddit.com directly; some people are more likely to use Perplexity; some people are more likely to use Claude; some people are more likely to even use Grok. This is putting a lot of attribution theories in the trash. Here’s what the modern B2B buyer’s journey looks like:
First, most Reddit users browse anonymously.
There’s no identifying information passing through to vendor analytics.
Second, when someone copies a link from a Reddit thread and pastes it into a browser… Or shares it in Slack… The UTM parameters either never existed or get stripped. Third, and most importantly, the conversion path is indirect.
A buyer reads a Reddit thread recommending your competitor.
They search for that competitor directly on Google.
Or they ask an LLM (which surfaces the competitors name directly via a citation on Reddit)
They visit the website.
Reddit gets zero credit.
The simplest fix that actually works?
Add a free-text “How did you hear about us?” field to your demo request forms. Here’s what ours looks like at Foundation:
It’s low-tech. It won’t satisfy your CFO’s desire for a deterministic attribution model. But it’s the only reliable way to surface the dark funnel activity that no software can track. Companies that do this consistently report being surprised by how often Reddit, podcasts, and word-of-mouth show up — sources that attribution software credits to “organic search” or “direct.”
The AEO/GEO/AI SEO Opportunity
When AI tools answer questions about enterprise software, where do they pull their information?
Reddit.
Research from Profound covering August 2024 through June 2025 found that Reddit is the #1 most cited domain by Google AI Overviews and Perplexity for software-related queries. It’s the #2 most cited domain by ChatGPT. Reddit went from appearing in 2,300 AI Overviews in November 2024 to 8.3 million by mid-2025.
That’s massive.
One of the ways that we’ve been working with our creditors is by running a profound audit and identifying what type of threats are being cited in the LLMs, and then working with our clients to create a subreddit where similar questions can be asked and they can engage.
This creates a second-order dark funnel effect that’s even harder to track.
A buyer asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best project management tool for a 500-person engineering org?” The AI synthesizes opinions from Reddit threads, delivers an answer, and the buyer never visits Reddit at all. The Reddit conversation still shaped the recommendation.
The buyer still acts on it.
But now there are two layers of invisibility between the influence and the conversion.
What this means for software vendors?
The uncomfortable truth is that your Reddit reputation might already be your most important marketing asset and you probably aren’t managing it. Here’s what the data suggests you should be paying attention to:
Start monitoring before you start marketing.
Before posting a single thing on Reddit, spend 90 days tracking what’s being said about your product and your competitors across relevant subreddits. Tools like Gummy Search, Reddit’s keyword monitoring features through the G2 partnership, or even simple saved searches can surface conversations you didn’t know were happening. You’ll likely discover that your product is being discussed — positively or negatively — more than you expected.
Rethink your attribution stack.
If you’re running pure last-click or even multi-touch attribution without a self-reported component, you’re flying blind to what may be your most influential channel. Add that “How did you hear about us?” free-text field. Run it for six months. Compare the self-reported data against what your attribution software says. The delta will be revealing.
Accept that your best “marketing” on Reddit is your product.
Reddit communities punish promotional behavior and reward genuine expertise. The brands that earn positive Reddit sentiment aren’t the ones running sophisticated community marketing campaigns. They’re the ones building products that practitioners actually want to recommend to their peers. Every negative Reddit thread about your product’s UX, your support response times, or your pricing opacity is doing more damage to your pipeline than a bad quarter of ad performance.
Recognize that your AI search reputation and your Reddit reputation are converging.
When 94% of buyers use AI during their purchase process, and AI tools disproportionately cite Reddit as their source, the Reddit conversation about your product IS your AI search result. This isn’t a channel you can afford to ignore and still expect to win in how AI models describe and recommend your category.
The dark funnel isn’t going away. Attribution models aren’t going to magically capture Reddit influence next quarter.
The generational shift toward independent, peer-driven research isn’t reversing. And AI is pouring accelerant on all of it.