We gave away our Reddit Playbook in Shenzhen, now it's yours
Happy Tuesday!
Last issue, I told you our Reddit comment deletion rate fell from 74% to 2.4%.
Last week, I got to stand in front of about 100 SEOs in Shenzhen and walk them through how.
This week's newsletter is basically the whole Jolly playbook we presented in those two talks:
The battleground for search visibility has evolved
Muskaan's visa was delayed, so I presented her first day's slides. The hot take:
The new SEO isn't about ranking. It's about being recommended.
Traditional search optimized for clicks. AI search optimizes for answers.
Sidenote: it was interesting sitting through day 2, listening to Muskaan talk about SEO & keywords as history. I realized the transition is happening more concretely now.
Back to the strategy:
If an old keyword was "AI customer support tool," the new prompt is "what AI customer support tool handles Mandarin and English with enterprise SEO under $500 a month?"
Same buyer. Completely different game.
I walked the room through Jolly's AI-Visibility Framework, the seven phases we run before we publish a single thing:
- Identify the ICP and build personas.
- Map the decision moments.
- Generate prompt clusters.
- Prioritize the prompts worth winning.
- Define what evidence AI needs to see.
- Design the narrative and brand integration.
- Validate and monitor whether we actually show up in the answers.
Here's the thing: Reddit is your newest digital PR and AI visibility channel.
If you're recommended on Reddit, AI is more likely to recommend you. If you're absent, AI struggles to find evidence you matter.
And if Reddit dislikes you, AI will happily surface that too.
One attendee summed up the morning better than I could: "The presentation from last Friday was incredibly enlightening and taught me a lot."
That's the whole reason we fly across the world to do these. (We also packaged the Reddit half of this into a free guide, The Hidden Layer of AI Search, if you'd rather read than fly.)
Then Muskaan spent four hours proving it
Our Director of Operations, Muskaan, ran a four-hour Reddit workshop for 30 people.
Four hours. Live exercises, real subreddits, real critique.
If you read #80, you met her one-liner already: Reddit is a massive operation, they're smarter than us, and if you keep hunting for hacks they'll keep writing policies to shut you down. Her whole workshop is the answer to that problem.
She called it "How to Reddit Like a Redditor," and the framing was perfect: your biggest competitor on Reddit isn't another brand. It's the moderation system.
A few of her takeaways the room kept writing down:
- Write like a Redditor, not a marketer. "We're excited to announce our revolutionary solution" gets deleted. "Went down a productivity rabbit hole so you don't have to" gets upvotes.
- Your account is your reputation. Nobody cares that you're a founder, they care what you've contributed and whether you've actually helped anyone.
- Stop chasing the big subreddits. A community of 20k engaged members beats 2M silent ones, which is exactly what our own data in #80 showed.
- The 80/20 rule of account hygiene. For every brand mention, earn it with far more genuine participation, because the accounts that win look like community members first.
She even ran a "spot the tourist" exercise: four real Reddit posts, two authentic and two promotional, and had the room guess which was which.
Half the marketers in the audience failed it. That was the point.
The feedback after her session was the kind you frame. "I really enjoyed your insights," one participant told her, and another said, "It's very helpful to have heard such an advanced course."
Four hours. Nobody left early.
Masterminding beats lecturing
The best conversations didn't happen on stage.
In between sessions, I sat down with a small group of attendees to work through their actual problems: which subreddits, which prompts, what evidence their brand was missing.
That's the format I'd run every time if I could. Slides teach the framework, but sitting in a circle teaches you whether you actually understood it.
It's also a decent preview of how we work with clients. The playbook is public now, so the judgment about how to apply it to your brand is the part worth paying for, and it's what our Reddit Brand Mentions team does every day.
Why this all rhymes with #80
AI decides what to recommend, and Reddit is one of the loudest inputs into that decision. And Reddit only rewards you if you show up like a human, not a billboard.
That's why our deletion rate is 2.4% instead of 74%. We stopped trying to beat the system and started earning our place in it.
Same philosophy we've always had with earned linkbuilding: the stuff that's hard to fake is the stuff that holds its value.
Shenzhen just gave us a room full of people to say it to out loud.
Until next week,
Greg
P.S. If watching 30 people get four hours of this made you want us to run Reddit for you, book a strategy call and we'll talk through your prompts and subreddits!