In partnership with
In college, I talked WPP out of a million dollars.
Late 2000s. WPP was the biggest ad holding company on the planet, and I was a kid with a pitch: a YouTube competitor, back before YouTube even had an algorithm. The money turned out to be the easy part. Getting anyone to show up was the hard part.
So I sat in the back of class, half-listening, posting to Reddit off an iPod Touch. That’s where I stumbled onto the most unfair traffic move I’ve ever run. I’ve run it for 20 years since, and it just quietly became more valuable than it’s ever been.
The move: stop chasing traffic and go stand in the conversations your buyers are already having. The threads where people ask “which tool should I use?” are the highest-intent traffic on the internet, and nobody owns them. You just show up and be useful. I wasn’t marketing. I was a community member.
Within a year we were doing 500,000 users a month. And Reddit was our engine.
That was almost 20 years ago. I’ve run the same play since, for D2C brands, for B2B, whatever has a community.
And I’ll tell you what I tell every founder who asks me: Reddit is the single hardest platform to crack, for exactly one reason. Show up to promote and you get eaten alive. Show up to be useful and you win. Participation and value.
That’s the whole game. It was true in 2007. It’s more true now.
So I built the thing I wish I’d had in the back of that b-school class. It’s called the Reddit AI Kit. Free, open source, link at the bottom.
It finds the conversations your buyers are already having on Reddit, hands you a genuinely useful comment for each one, and keeps you showing up on a steady rhythm without torching your account. Clone it today.
But first I want to show you why this works now better than it ever has, because if you skip this part you’ll just get yourself banned.
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the part that’s almost unfair now
Here’s what I couldn’t have seen coming back then.
Those threads I was leaving comments on don’t just get read by Redditors anymore. They get read by the AI.
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google for the best tool in a category, and they don’t pull your homepage. They pull the page that already ranks for that question. For buyer questions, that’s almost always a Reddit thread.
Check this out. A massive new data study analyzed 30 million AI sources this year.
Reddit came out as the single most-cited source on the entire internet, crushing YouTube and LinkedIn.
Google is literally paying Reddit $60 million a year to train on its data. OpenAI is reportedly paying around $70 million. The biggest tech platforms on earth are spending nine figures to put human Reddit conversations inside their answers.
You don’t need to outrank the Reddit thread on Google. You just need to become the most useful, highly-voted comment inside that thread, and the AI will read your answer back to the next buyer who asks.
I call this The Answer Wedge.
buyers ask ─► thread ranks ─► AI reads it ─► AI repeats it
on reddit on google for answers to the next buyer
│
┌────────┴────────┐
│ your answer │ ◄── the wedge
│ goes in here │
└─────────────────┘stop overthinking geo
You’re hearing a lot about GEO and “AI visibility” right now. Like everything: mostly noise, a little signal, a few real operators.
Here’s my read: GEO is SEO. Same job, new surface. You’re still optimizing your brand for how people search and discover, the search box just turned into a chat. Do SEO well and your site, crawlability, and authority are already handled. (If they’re not, reply and I’ll send you my one-pager.)
What’s actually new: your website is now just one piece. Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube do the heavy lifting in AI answers, and Reddit is the one founders ask me about every single week.
They know they should be there. They’re just intimidated.
Where do I start?
Which subreddits?
Use my name or stay anonymous?
How do I not get banned on day one?
That’s exactly what I built this for.
here’s what it actually does
Now, you could do all of this by hand. Spend your hours scouring subreddits, guessing which threads actually matter, writing every response from scratch.
But if you’re like me, you don’t want a second full-time job living inside Reddit. You want the workflow on easy mode.
Want more easy mode? We install custom AI marketing agents that do 100% of the work. Book your build here.
So I built a tool that runs the whole thing for you. You point it at your category. It goes and finds the Reddit threads your buyers are already reading, the ones already ranking on Google, and ranks them by how worth your time they are.
Then it hands you back one clean page. Every thread, sorted into the ones to enter now, the ones to keep an eye on, and the ones to skip. Something like this:
And for each one worth entering, it drafts you a comment you can finish in about two minutes. Not a pitch. A real answer: lead with the honest options, say plainly where you lose to Obsidian and where you win, and disclose who you are. Then you make it sound like you, and post.
That’s the whole loop, on one page, every time it runs.
how much it does for you is your call
Think of it as a dial, from “just show me” to “handle it.”
At the start it just does the homework: here are the threads, here’s a comment for each, you make it yours and hit post. Nothing leaves without you.
Once it’s earned your trust, you let it post the ones that clearly pass your rules, on your schedule, and it taps you the second anything looks off.
the one rule that actually matters
Twenty years of this comes down to one rule, and it’s the opposite of what you’d guess.
The whole time I was pulling in those half a million monthly users, only one in every seven things I posted to Reddit was our content. The other six posts were just useful to the community. Six for them. One for me. Value to promotion.
That ratio is the move. So I built it into the code, where you can’t break it by accident: be valuable, not a scammer.
Spray promotional comments and Reddit will eat you alive, exactly like it would have in 2008. So the kit won’t let you.
→ It paces you. A cap on how much you post a day, how often you hit the same subreddit, and a cooldown in between. It would rather post less than build something that looks like spam.
→ It makes you disclose. A comment that hides who you are doesn’t go out. Period.
→ It pulls the plug the moment things go sideways. One comment removed, one annoyed mod, and it stops everything and tells you. You start it back up on purpose, never by accident.
One real account. Real answers. Honest disclosure. It’s the only version that has ever worked, and the only version that ever will.
wait for it…
The payoff lags. Reddit moves first, Google later, the AI tools later still. Give it 30 to 90 days, not 30 minutes. Anyone promising you a guaranteed ChatGPT citation in two weeks is selling you something.
who this is for
→ founders in categories where buyers ask “best tool for X”
→ agencies building AI-search visibility for clients
→ anyone willing to write one genuinely useful comment before they mention themselves
Not for you if:
→ you want to run bot farms or fake accounts. this breaks on purpose for that.
→ you can’t disclose who you are. the gate won’t let you.
why I actually care about this
About a year ago I got to spend half an hour with Alexis Ohanian. I’m not telling you that to name-drop. I’m telling you because I mostly spent it thanking him.
Reddit didn’t just build my career. Back in 2020, on a few dead-quiet niche subreddits, it’s where I found the other weirdos who were obsessed with AI before it was a thing. I love a good rabbit hole. Reddit is the best one ever made.
This kit is me handing you the on-ramp I had to figure out the hard way.
get the kit
Point it at your category, pick how much you want it doing for you, and start showing up in the answers.
You get:
the part that finds the Reddit threads already ranking on Google for your buyers
a score on each one, so you know which to enter and which to skip
a ready-to-finish comment for every thread worth your time, your disclosure already in it
the guardrails that keep you from getting banned: pacing, disclosure, and an automatic stop the second a mod pushes back
the dial from “just show me” to “handle it”
a weekly read on whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude have started naming you
No upsell. No catch. MIT. Fork it.
The play that worked in 2007 works better today. Go be useful.
Go big,
Matt
P.S. This slots into the stack. Frontrun maps where your category is moving. Slideshow Kit ships the angles. Outcome Kit scores which ones made buyers. The Reddit AI Kit earns you the mention when a buyer asks the AI directly. Four free kits, one loop.
P.P.S. Want my GEO one-pager, the top tips for the rest of the surface (your site, crawlability, authority)? Reply to this email and I’ll send it. And star the repo if you grab it, it tells me to keep building.