Reddit

Erlin tracks every reddit.com URL that AI cites across your tracked prompts and shows you where your brand is mentioned, how the community talks about you, and what competitors come up in the same threads. All three citation types (publications, Reddit, and YouTube) appear in the same Citations view in Erlin. Click the Reddit tab to filter to reddit.com sources only.

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Why Reddit citations are different

Reddit threads carry authentic community signal. AI models treat them as genuine user opinion rather than marketing content, which gives Reddit mentions significant weight in AI-generated answers. The dynamics are very different from editorial publications: You cannot edit someone else’s thread. Unlike a review article where you can request inclusion, you cannot ask a moderator to add your brand to an existing Reddit post. Influence here is indirect. Authenticity matters more than anywhere else. AI models are trained to distinguish organic discussion from promotional content. Self-promotional posts get downvoted and flagged. Astroturfing does not work and can backfire if the community notices. Recency drives citation. Reddit threads rotate based on engagement and age. A thread cited today may be replaced by a newer one next week as the subreddit generates fresh discussions. This means Reddit citations are more volatile than publication citations. Sentiment is unfiltered. Reddit users share honest opinions, including complaints, praise, and comparisons. The sentiment you see on Reddit citations tends to be more extreme (both positive and negative) than editorial publications.

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What Erlin tracks

For every reddit.com URL cited by AI, Erlin records the same fields as any citation source:

• Source URL (the specific Reddit thread)
• Citation count (how many times AI cited this thread)
• Platforms (which AI models cited it)
• Brand mentioned (whether your brand appears in the thread)
• Sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative)
• Influence score (0.0 to 1.0)
• Competitors mentioned (other brands discussed in the thread)

The Reddit tab surfaces only sources on reddit.com, filtering out all other citation types.

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How to read drilldowns on Reddit

When you open the drilldown for a Reddit citation, Erlin scrapes the thread and reports:

• Whether your brand is mentioned in the original post (OP) or in the comments
• The sentiment of mentions (is the community praising you, neutral, or critical?)
• Which competitors are discussed in the same thread and how they are positioned
• The exact excerpt containing your brand mention
• Whether your brand has a rank position (in threads that rank/list products)

Interpreting Reddit drilldowns: Reddit threads where your brand appears in the OP (original post) carry more weight than threads where you only appear in a buried comment. AI models weight top-level content and highly-upvoted comments more heavily than deep replies.

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What you can do

Reddit citations respond to a different strategy than publications. The playbook: 1. Monitor which threads AI is pulling from. Track whether you are mentioned in the popular threads for your category. If the top-cited thread names three competitors and not you, that is a visibility gap. But unlike publications, you cannot simply request to be added. 2. Earn organic mentions through genuine participation. Participate authentically in relevant subreddits. Answer questions where your product genuinely solves the problem. Over time, organic mentions accumulate in threads that AI indexes. Rules of thumb:

• Disclose your affiliation when recommending your own product
• Provide value beyond just recommending yourself (answer the full question)
• Build a post history in the community before making product-related comments

3. Create content that Reddit users link to. Original research, free tools, data visualizations, and genuinely helpful resources get shared on Reddit. When a thread links to your site and AI later cites that thread, you benefit from both the Reddit mention and the potential citation. 4. React to sentiment shifts, not individual threads. If a thread with negative mentions of your brand starts getting cited by AI, address the underlying issue rather than the thread itself. Fix what’s broken (the product issue, the billing confusion, the support gap). The conversations shift naturally once the problem is solved. Trying to respond to individual negative Reddit threads is usually counterproductive. Addressing the root cause is what actually changes the AI’s training data over time. 5. Track Reddit sentiment as an early warning system. Reddit is often the first place users complain publicly. A spike in negative-sentiment Reddit citations frequently precedes drops in overall Sentiment Score. Catching it here gives you the earliest possible signal.

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