Eimear Colleran.
Eimear Colleran, Head of Marketing, Prophet
I don't think marketers suddenly fell in love with Reddit, I think they suddenly realised they were no longer the author.
For years, Reddit was where you'd end up after Googling "best coffee machine" or "which Real Housewives franchise should I start with?" It was a place for brutally honest opinions, niche hobbies and people who cared far too much about mechanical keyboards.
Most marketers ignored it. Now everyone wants a Reddit strategy, not because consumers have changed, because AI has.
For the best part of two decades, marketing has been built around one fundamental question: “How do we get found on Google?”
Entire industries emerged to answer it. We optimised headlines. Chased backlinks. Wrote endless blogs answering questions nobody had ever actually asked. Somewhere along the way, half the internet started sounding like it had been written by the same intern with a thesaurus.
Then, almost overnight, the question changed. People aren't just searching anymore. They're asking things like…
- "Why is my dog's poo soft after switching food?"
- "Which EV should I buy?"
- "Will natural diamonds be worth more than lab-grown ones in 2040?"
- "What's the Korean version of my entire skincare routine?"
Increasingly, those questions aren't going to Google. They're going to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Consumers aren't just searching anymore. They're outsourcing decisions. And here's the part I don't think marketers have fully appreciated - AI doesn't care what your brand says about itself. It cares what everyone else says about you.
That's a confronting thought if you're a marketer.
Because for the first time in decades, the story isn't being told by the people with the media budget. It's being told by everyone else.
The internet just got human again
There's a wonderful irony in all of this. For 20 years, marketers became exceptionally good at writing for algorithms. SEO rewarded things like predictability, key words, H1s, H2s, structured copy, FAQs and content clusters. The result was a web optimised to be crawled rather than read.
Meanwhile, Reddit quietly accumulated nearly 20 years of messy, opinionated, contradictory human conversations. People debating whether a $90 pillow is a life-changing investment or a sophisticated scam. Forty-three strangers collectively convincing another stranger not to get bangs. People explaining why they returned their Tesla after three weeks. Others ranking the world's best instant noodles. They're sharing the kind of experiences no brand would ever put in a campaign.
For years, marketers dismissed that content because it couldn't be controlled. Now AI sees it as one of the internet's most valuable assets.
That's why Reddit suddenly matters. Somewhere, every social media manager who spent years pretending Reddit didn't exist is quietly building karma under the name DefinitelyNotABrandGirlie007 before she can "accidentally" recommend the brand. Not because it's fashionable, because it's believable.
Marketing has inherited another job
Marketing hasn't inherited another channel, it's inherited another audience.
We've spent years trying to influence consumers. Now we're also influencing the systems consumers ask for advice. And that's a completely different discipline.
You can't outbid your competitors for a recommendation inside an AI model. You can't brief an agency to manufacture genuine customer advocacy. You can't optimise authenticity after the fact.
If thousands of people consistently recommend your product, that's a signal. If they consistently complain about your customer service, that's a signal too.
AI is remarkably good at finding patterns. Unfortunately for marketers, it doesn't distinguish between the patterns we'd like it to find and the ones we'd rather it didn't.
The most valuable media your brand owns might not be media at all
This is where I think the industry's instinct has been predictable.
Every conference suddenly has a panel on "winning in AI search." Every agency has an AI optimisation framework. Every marketer is asking the same questions:
- How do we rank in ChatGPT?
- How do we appear in AI Overviews?
- How do we make sure AI recommends us?
They're perfectly reasonable questions, I just don't think they're the right ones because they're still focused on optimising the output.
The harder question is: what is AI actually learning from in the first place?
Because you can't optimise your way out of a reputation problem. AI isn't simply indexing websites, it's synthesising trust. It reads your website. It reads reviews. It reads Reddit. It reads forums. It reads news coverage. It reads the conversations your customers are having when your marketing team isn't in the room.
For years, we measured impressions because that's what media created. The next competitive advantage may not be impressions at all - it might be consensus.
The brands that win won't shout the loudest
The winning brands will be the ones people genuinely recommend. That's a much harder strategy to fake. It demands better products, better customer experiences and better conversations.
Ironically, it’s taking marketing back to where it started. Before search. Before social. Before programmatic. When the most powerful thing a brand could earn was somebody saying, "You should try these guys."
The difference is that recommendation no longer disappears into a pub conversation or a group chat, it becomes part of the internet's collective memory. And increasingly, that's the memory AI relies on.
For decades, marketers have obsessed over what brands say. The next decade will belong to brands that understand what the internet says about them. Because your next customer may never visit your website. They may never click your ad. They may never even search for your brand. They'll simply ask an AI.
And the answer they get probably won't come from your marketing… it'll come from your reputation. Turns out that's been your most valuable marketing channel all along.