Reddit outweighs Instagram in the answer AI gives about you
We measured ten markets. The forum where your brand cannot promote itself shows up twice as often as the network it invests in most.
A number that complicates the media plan
While classifying the 192 page-one positions we measured across ten Brazilian markets, we separated the ones belonging to social platforms and forums. There were 17, about 9% of the total.
The aggregate is modest. The distribution is what stings:
- Reddit: appeared in 6 of the 10 markets
- Instagram: 3 markets
- YouTube: 1 market
The forum shows up twice as often as the social network where most brands concentrate their time and budget.
Where each one appeared
Reddit appeared in food retail, fashion, education, software, furniture and footwear. In food retail it was the most frequent domain in the entire sector, ahead of every supermarket chain, on most of the themes we measured.
Instagram appeared in cosmetics, fashion and clinics. It is worth noting how it appeared: in fashion, the Instagram result on the brands theme was a third party's post discussing brands, not any brand's own profile.
Why the forum wins this
A forum thread is close to the ideal format for an AI assistant to use as a source.
It carries a question written in natural language, several concrete answers from different people, direct comparisons between options, caveats, and the whole thing indexed and readable. It is exactly the material a model needs to answer "which one is worth it" with any confidence.
A social post is the opposite: the information sits in the image, the text is short and promotional, and the platform makes automated reading hard. It is built for reach, not for being quoted.
And here is the problem
The obvious move would be "so publish on Reddit". It is not.
Reddit has its own culture and explicit rules against self-promotion. A brand that shows up posting about itself gets banned, and the outcome is usually worse than absence: a negative thread about the attempt, also indexed and readable.
So the channel that weighs most in the answer is precisely the one where a brand cannot act by publishing. That changes what can be done.
Why this is harder than it looks
The answer is not to publish more. This is precisely where publishing does not work.
The channel that weighs most in the answer is the one where a brand has no editorial control at all: the writers are customers, and the community rejects anyone who shows up selling. That rules out, from the start, the tactic most agencies sell.
What is left is indirect and slow. It depends on understanding what is already written about your brand, telling a wrong fact from a legitimate opinion, and making sure the correct information exists somewhere people find it when they go to answer. None of that is a campaign, and none of it pays off in a week.
It is one of the points where we step in and do the work, because it needs continuous attention and judgement about where to act and where to stay quiet.
An honest caveat
Nine percent is a small aggregate. In pharmacy and automotive, social and forums did not reach page one once. If your market is one of those, this is not your priority.
The per-sector detail, with the domains that appeared on each question, is on the food retail, fashion and software pages, the three markets where the forum weighed most.