A year and a half ago, I wrote “The rise of forums: Why Google prefers them and how to adapt,” arguing that brands should build their own online forums and communities.

Let’s look at what’s happened since.

• As of this writing, Reddit’s stock price has risen 177.6%. If you’d bought 100 shares of RDDT then, you’d be $13,113 richer today.
• In a June 2025 analysis of 150,000 AI citations, Semrush found that Reddit was the top source, appearing in more than 40% of LLM responses.

So what happened? It comes down to the law of supply and demand. 

The supply-and-demand crisis of online answers

The demand for answers has skyrocketed as people increasingly turn to LLMs. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok will try to come up with the answers from their training data and failing that, they’ll search the web.

ChatGPT uses Bing, Gemini uses Google and Claude, Grok and Perplexity use their own internal search engine. The web search engine will quickly find that the supply of long-tail answers is nonexistent. 

And so it will surface the closest thing it can find: a Reddit thread that matches the keywords, but could very well have been written by a novice, an armchair expert or a troll. Whose fault is it that the web is devoid of meaningful long-tail content?

Ultimately, it was Google’s. 

Even the best SEO professionals among us were told by our clients and bosses that nothing mattered except for the One Ring – getting ranked at the top for a highly competitive keyword. We all started to write the same blog posts to try to grab that top spot, while the vast long tail went ignored.

The irony is that if your brand has any expertise or authority in its space, it always could – and still can – completely own the undiscovered country of the long-tail of search for your industry, a frontier of questions no brand has yet answered.

The advantages of user-generated content

The best way to do this – by far – is through user-generated content (UGC), which has several key characteristics:

• It matches search intent: Users post the same way they search, using the same words.
• It’s always up-to-date: New posts keep topics current without constant editorial work.
• It’s accurate: Assuming your brand can attract experienced experts who contribute, each new reply will add value or correction. 
• It builds semantic depth: Conversations naturally surface related terms, subtopics and entities that boost SEO and LLM discovery.
• It’s trustworthy and AI-proof: Authentic human discussion is the one thing that LLMs can’t replicate.

If this all sounds familiar to you, it’s the same old E-E-A-T that Google has been trying to get us to do for years.

Only now, it really counts. 

Dig deeper: Reddit marketing guide – maximize your spend

Why brands hesitate

Most companies instinctively resist the idea of launching a forum. 

Here are the objections I hear most often – and how I respond.

• It’s too expensive: Ironically, forum and Q&A software is among the most mature open-source software. You can literally have a production-ready system up and running in a week at a cost less than a few cups of coffee. I’ll share some examples below. 
• We don’t have the development resources: If you’re not familiar with the concept of open-source,

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