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LLMs are rapidly changing how we use the internet. Remember just a few years ago when you’d search for something on Google and scroll through the results like some kind of Neanderthal? Heck, you might even click through to page 2 if you were feeling spicy.
These days—and, knowing how this stuff ages, I should perhaps be less broad than "these days" and say just "in January 2026"—Google’s AI Overview at the top of the results has got pretty good for basic stuff, making looking at the actual search results less necessary. That’s if folk even get to Google, when they’ve got an LLM close at hand to answer any and every question that they throw at it (regardless of whether it’s a lazy "how do you spell irony" or somewhat more LLM-appropriate "ELI5 nuclear fusion").
These factors mean that marketing teams at vendors are seeing their site traffic drop off the proverbial cliff 📉. And if you can’t get folk onto your site to convince them to buy your product, you have to reach them elsewhere. One of those ways is to go to where they are, and for developers that includes Reddit. This has a dual benefit, because not only do you interact with developers in their natural habitat, but you populate the forums (subreddits, known as "subs") that are then scraped and used to train the LLMs—thus hopefully influencing the output of future generations of LLMs with the message you’re trying to take to developers.
So what pitfalls await such an effort? Can you actually market to developers on Reddit?
We’re not talking MQLs here folks
✨Look at me with all the fancy acronyms!✨
Marketing Qualified Leads are what you and I become once we’ve handed over contact details and sent some signal we’re worth tapping up by the sales team. Maybe you got your badge scanned at a conference booth, or put your email address into a form to download an ebook.
This kind of marketing is a gazillion miles from what I’m talking about on Reddit. Move along here…no MQLs for you…
Advertising on Reddit
The next obvious way to reach developers on Reddit is pay for their eyeballs. I’ve seen good ads on Reddit, and plenty of awful ones.
What some companies don’t realise is that how you advertise to developers on Reddit is very different from how you advertise to executives in the back of Forbes. Developers can smell a vendor at ten paces, and will scroll away rapidly at the hint of it.
Memes yes. On-brand corporate messaging, hell no.
| If you’re planning to advertise on Reddit then Zachary Short, Ali Yildirim, and Marie Jaksman have all written useful LinkedIn posts with good advice. |
Do you understand Reddit?
I hint at this above, but Reddit is a fairly unique place.
Reddit is the best place.
Reddit is the worst place.
People are horrid, people are mean.
People are also warm and welcoming.
Reddit is not LinkedIn. Reddit is not just another forum. Reddit is loosely governed, with wildly different attitudes prevailing between "subs". Some are buttoned up and well behaved, whilst others barely manage to pull a pair of pants on in the morning before sitting down at their laptop.
This kind of comment, which the child in me spat coffee all over my monitor in reading, is fairly typical:
Would you use that language in front of your grandmother? No, of course not, but we’re on Reddit here.
Marketer, beware.
If you’re looking at Reddit as a "channel" for your "26-Q1 Awareness campaign", you’ve not read the room. If you’ve read the room and continue with it anyway…well…you deserve every downvote and flame that you will get.
Oh, and if you’re the kind of bottom-feeding marketing agency offering Reddit astroturfing as a service, well, you’re the reason we can’t have nice things.
Reddit is a real place for real humans to gather and interact, as humans. For a good reason, subs usually have a strong and visceral immune system response to what they will see as spam.
Your "organic awareness drive" is their spam. Your "sharing a helpful doc" is their spam. Your "customer success story" is their spam.
And on Reddit, you play by their rules.
So, how do you successfully reach developers on Reddit?
Just the same you would reach developers with any grassroots community interaction.
Any good DevRel professional already knows this. It’s instinctive, and it’s DevRel 101. We’re not here to sell, we’re here to educate, and inform.
Engage with good intentions
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Be genuine.
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Be helpful. Answer questions that aren’t to do with your product.
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Be patient. You’re building a relationship, not trying to close a deal.
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Be thick-skinned. Not everyone will like you, and that’s ok.
Don’t piss in the pool
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Don’t be a shill. Oh, you’re "super excited" about this product? Oh really…?
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Don’t try to sell. Gross.
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Don’t drive-by link-drop. Stay for the conversation—and the flames, if the link isn’t welcomed in the sub you’re sharing it with.
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Don’t even mention your product unless it actually makes sense in the context of the discussion. And even then…don’t mention it every time.
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And, jfc, for the love of whatever is holy to you…do NOT post AI slop.
Reddit logistics
Where are your users at? That’s the sub you want to be in. Perhaps there are several; be in all of them. Lurk, get a feel for the discussions, decide where you want to interact.
If there’s no sub, then perhaps you aren’t looking hard enough. There’s usually a sub for everything (and I mean…everything 😳). If there really isn’t, then you can start one. Unlike StackOverflow, Reddit is not on the decline so starting a sub can be a good idea if you’re prepared to put the work in to look after it.
If you find there’s a larger sub with a significant subset of discussions involving your community getting lost in the noise, maybe that’s an indicator that there might be demand for a dedicated sub.
Reddit subs are a bit like areas of a city; you get pristine ones that are tightly controlled and well kept, you get slovenly ones with no active mods and lots of low-effort posts. If you find a sub that’s gone to seed, you can apply to become a mod. Being a mod doesn’t mean you get god powers to shill your company or silence competitors. This is about community, remember? If you can help a sub thrive, you help the community, and a healthy community can only be good for your company too.
