In this episode, Ross Simmonds breaks down how Reddit quietly took over bottom-of-funnel search, why AI is amplifying it, and what marketers must do now to stay visible. If your content strategy still revolves around “create more,” you might already be falling behind.
https://page2pod.com - In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, we sit down with Ross Simmonds to unpack one of the biggest shifts happening in search today: Reddit's rise in Google rankings and AI-generated answers.
After analyzing over 8,500 keywords across 13 B2B brands, Ross reveals why long-tail queries—once ignored due to "zero search volume"—are now driving real traffic, conversions, and visibility across both Google and LLMs.
We dive deep into how brands are losing control of their narrative to anonymous users, why Reddit is dominating bottom-of-funnel searches, and how marketers can adapt with a distribution-first mindset. Ross also shares tactical frameworks for building a Reddit presence, blending organic and paid strategies, and leveraging AI to scale smarter—not just faster.
Whether you're in SEO, content marketing, or growth, this episode will completely reshape how you think about visibility in 2026 and beyond.
🚀 In This Episode
• Reddit now dominates high-intent, long-tail search queries
• Why "zero search volume" keywords are actually gold opportunities
• How AI and LLMs amplify Reddit content in search results
• The 3-account Reddit strategy every brand should use
• Why most marketers fail (and get banned) on Reddit
• How to reverse-engineer viral Reddit posts using historical data
• The shift from "create more" to "distribute first" marketing
• Blending Reddit organic + paid for high-performing campaigns
• How AI tools like Claude are transforming content workflows
• Why distribution is no longer a "nice-to-have" but a necessity
This episode breaks down exactly how modern marketers can win in a world where search, AI, and community-driven content collide.
👍 If you found this valuable, make sure to subscribe for more insights on SEO, AI, and content marketing strategy.
💬 Drop a comment below: Are you currently using Reddit in your marketing strategy—or still ignoring it?
🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned
• Follow Ross Simmonds on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosssimmonds/
• Follow Ross Simmonds on X https://x.com/TheCoolestCool
• Follow Ross Simmonds on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rosssimmondsig/
• Ross Simmonds Personal Website https://rosssimmonds.com/
• Listen to the Ross Simmonds Show https://rosssimmonds.com/
• Foundation Inc https://foundationinc.co/
• Distribution AI https://www.distribution.ai/
• Ross' book Create Once Distribute Forever https://amzn.to/3Q05fTb
• Ross on getting banned from Reddit https://kpplaybook.com/resources/content-distribution-mastering-the-art-of-visibility-in-the-ai-era/
• The Comprehensive GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — guide https://foundationinc.co/lab/generative-engine-optimization
Jon Clark (00:00)
Welcome to the Page 2 Podcast where we uncover the strategies, systems and tactical decisions that move brands beyond page two and into real visibility across search and answer engines. Today we're joined by Ross Simmonds to dig into what happens when the most valuable real estate in search isn't your website, but a Reddit thread posted by someone you've never met. Ross is the founder of Foundation Marketing and Distribution.ai and the bestselling author of Create Once, Distribute Forever.
He spent years helping B2B brands scale their content. In this episode, Ross walks us through what his team found after analyzing 8,566 keywords across 13 B2B brands on Reddit. We get into why long-tail queries that used to show zero volume in Ahrefs and SEMrush are now driving both Google results and AI-generated answers, and why brands are suddenly scrambling to catch up on a platform they've been ignoring or getting banned from for years. Brands are used to owning their narrative.
Now it's being shaped by anonymous users, three-year-old threads, and communities that don't exactly roll out the welcome mat for marketers. Ross gets tactical in this episode, talking us through the steps on how to actually build a Reddit presence the right way and blend Reddit paid and organic data in strategic ways. Ross makes the case that most companies are still stuck in a create-more cycle while the winners are quietly moving to distribution-first systems. As he puts it, distribution has gone from vitamin to painkiller.
If you've been wondering if your content strategy is built for where search is actually heading, this one's for you. If you get something out of it, go subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and let us know what landed. We'd love to hear it. Okay, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:43)
Welcome to episode 114 of the Page Two Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and I'm joined as always by my partner at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today we're joined by someone named one of the most influential marketers in the world by BuzzSumo, SEMrush, Moz, and I'm sure many others. He is an author, founder of Foundation Marketing, a B2B content marketing agency, and Distribution AI. Just excited to hear a little bit more about that.
Joe (01:52)
Hello.
Jon Clark (02:08)
And he's the person I go to anytime I have questions around Reddit. You may know him by his Twitter handle, @thecoolestcool, Ross Simmonds. Welcome to the show.
Ross Simmonds (02:17)
Thanks for having me on. Super excited to be here, guys. And congratulations on 100-plus episodes. It's a massive milestone.
Joe (02:22)
Well, you put a lot out there too. We spent a lot of time taking in your content and I have a couple of really quick questions before we even get into it, but I have watched you on video at least a hundred times. You never wear the same sweater. How many sweaters do you own?
Ross Simmonds (02:39)
I've got a lot and the collection keeps growing. I have like this obsession. Some people obsess over clicks and SERPs, I obsess over sweaters. It's the only thing that allows me to be okay living in Canada with this temperate climate that we have. It's like, all right, if I have to suffer, then let's suffer in style at least.
Joe (02:57)
All right, well, so I'm going to build on that because you do put out a ton of content, a lot of it's video, and I'm sure you've got a really fine-tuned process working with AI and your team to support you. I heard you just hint at this kind of life hack you have about a work-life balance hack where you call it work-life integration. Can you just start with that so people can understand how a guy as busy as you can get through a normal day?
Ross Simmonds (03:17)
Yeah, so work-life integration was kind of my early belief around how work and life should be done. There's this philosophy of work-life balance that a lot of people talk about all the time. And I just thought that that idea wouldn't work for me. I couldn't ever find a state of contentment when I always had to have like a 50-50 split between work and life.
So I came to this conclusion that the best way to do this is just to integrate it all. So try to find ways in which my life and my work can be one and the same and they can be integrated to a point where I don't feel the reflection and the weight of trying to look back at my calendar and say, yeah, I did this wrong, I didn't do this correctly. So I created a handful of different rules that I kind of live by, whether it's Wired in Wednesdays where we don't take any calls, we just wire in, put in headphones, drink coffee and get work done. I started that with my very first company probably about 15 or 16 years ago, and I've done that ever since. I have a hard stop since I have kids now at five. I have like a 15-minute buffer at five o'clock where I kind of just go from CEO mode to dad mode. And then I go downstairs and I don't bring my phone. And then I do bedtime, all of that good stuff until about nine. Then I go from nine to 10 hanging out with the wife, then from 10 to 11, I check back in on the inbox, then I go to sleep, and then I wake back up and do the whole thing. I also do these things called shoot days for video content. So all of those sweaters, all of those different styles, I put them in a bag, I go out and I record a bunch of video. I have a studio that I go to, I bring that bag out and I'm just changing from outfit to outfit. If you look closely, you'll notice that my hair tends to stay the same in a few shots. It's because it is the same, I haven't adjusted it.
Jon Clark (05:09)
Haha.
Ross Simmonds (05:12)
So there's a lot of that. I created a home studio as well so I have multiple cameras set up so I can record content here now. Then I have the benefit of being a geek and obsessing over AI. And I have a lot of this footage and this content that's connected into my drive, connected into Claude Code where it will actually take all of the transcriptions from the content that I'm producing and create like this database of all of the ideas that Ross has had over the years. And it's constantly running each night, I have this Claude project set up where it scrapes it, identifies latest tweets, latest LinkedIn posts that I'm sharing, voice notes that I'm sending out to it, and it will give me ideas on things that I'm talking about regularly and use that as more content. So I never really have gaps in terms of the ability to come up with new ideas. I just rarely have the time to go out and create them, and the time is kind of being easily augmented on the back of some of these tools. So long answer to a short question. I just integrate all the things all the time. I love tech. I use it. I created a life operating system on my drive a few months back where I optimize for how many daddy-daughter dates I have a year. I optimize for how many people I'm reaching out to to try to drive business. I'm a geek and I embrace spreadsheets a lot and AI just makes it even better to be able to do it. So yeah, that's how I embrace this whole work-life integration is just always top of mind.
Jon Clark (06:38)
I mean, let's dig into the spreadsheets and the AI. Are you still using spreadsheets? I mean, it sounds like you have a very efficient setup on the AI side. We've started to do a ton of stuff with Claude Code. I mean, it's just mind blowing. I mean, take us through that. Are you still using spreadsheets? How long does it take you to set up?
Ross Simmonds (06:44)
Yeah, it's wild. I do still use them. The reason why I use them, it's Google Sheets primarily, but I've been using a lot of the apps and using Claude Code to even build scripts that go into them, connecting the Google Sheet to Zapier or connecting it directly into certain APIs pulling data into the spreadsheet because I view it as different layers. So the human layer, which is me, I'm the human layer. I still respect and appreciate a spreadsheet. I can look at a spreadsheet and my human eyes can understand what it's looking at in a better format than just a data set. So I enjoy and get value out of a Gantt chart. I get value out of dynamic cells that will say if I'm on track or off track on certain things. And you could build an interface for this, I just don't feel like I want to learn new tricks in that regard. I'd rather just use a Google Sheet.
So for example, the life operating system that I've built, I prioritize health, wealth, relationships, business, charity, nonprofit, community, family, friends, relationships with my wife, that kind of stuff. Each cell, each tab has details around whether or not I'm doing certain things and it actually will connect to my calendar. So if my calendar isn't showing that I've gone to the gym, if it isn't showing that I've done yoga, gone to a yoga session, if it pulls in my email that I haven't actually booked it, if I'm not booking time with a golf coach to get to my goal of breaking 90, it will put all of this data into a spreadsheet for me. And then at the end of the month, I can reflect and be like, right, I didn't book a date night. We loved going to concerts, why isn't that in my calendar with my kids or my wife? So I use spreadsheets, but I leverage AI to input the data from things that I naturally am using to keep me accountable and I do the same thing in business, which is also fun.
Jon Clark (08:46)
I mean, that's super powerful. I'm really excited about trying to do a little bit more on the daddy-daughter side.
Ross Simmonds (08:50)
It's so cool. It's fun. I have two daughters and a son.
Joe (08:55)
Ross, you have two daughters? Two daughters and a son, my gosh. So you are, I think you'll win the prize for busiest guest this year.
Jon Clark (09:04)
Hahaha.
Ross Simmonds (09:05)
I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah, seven, five and three right now. So they're all young little pups. But it's been a lot of fun. It's been a wild journey.
Joe (09:13)
So you create a lot of personal goals, it sounds like. You've got a really good structure. I use spreadsheets in my goals too, but I'm curious. You look back in a month, you look maybe monthly, probably more often, but you look back at the last month and you say, my God, I accomplished everything that I hoped to accomplish. What's the reward you give yourself?
Ross Simmonds (09:38)
Honestly, the reward for me is this little mug that my kids gave me that says, world's greatest dad. Like to me, that's everything. So when they are happy, I'm happy. If everyone is good, I'm good. I'm doing my job. I don't really need anything outside of a happy family and household. When everybody's good, I'm good. So that's really the reward. If I was to celebrate, I think once football season starts back up, maybe I'll buy myself a ticket to Philly and go see a game again. But for now, football's not on. That's my treat. So I'd say that would be my answer. When things are good, you'll see me at an Eagles game. I'm buying NFC tickets and stuff like that. I won't go to the Super Bowl because I don't think I could bounce back from heartbreak to spend that much money and then see a loss. But every other game I'll cough up the dollars and go.
Jon Clark (10:15)
Well, we're talking a lot about data. Maybe we jump right into some of the Reddit research you've been putting out, which has been, man, there's just so many interesting things to pluck out of there. So maybe just to start with the numbers, you were looking at, I think it was over 8,566 keywords across 13 B2B SaaS brands, which is sort of where Foundation focuses, right, on the B2B side. What was the most interesting thing that you took out of the report? We definitely have some questions around the data, but from your perspective, what was it that really stood out?
Ross Simmonds (10:53)
So one of the brands that we looked at were review sites. And when we look at review sites, the beauty of a review site is that they have queries that go after every niche. So as much as the overarching data set looked at a few different URLs, some of the URLs that we looked at were actually review sites. And review sites go after every software company that you can have a category in, whether we're looking at Capterra, G2, TrustRadius, et cetera. So when we're looking at those, one of the biggest insights that we had was that Reddit was absolutely dominating when it came to bottom-of-funnel queries. And I don't know about you guys, but for me, the most valuable keywords is the bottom of the funnel. The sale is in the long tail. When someone has high intent and they're saying the best X, Y, and Z or alternatives to ABC, they are in a transactional mindset where they are ready to swipe a credit card, book a demo, give you money. So as a professional, I'm like, those are the keywords that matter. And Reddit went from not showing up there at all, let's say two years ago, to absolutely dominating today. And the longer the query, the more likely Reddit was to show up. That to me was the biggest insight in the entire analysis. Because if someone and the audience that we're talking about is using an LLM or they're using Google to ask and look for the best CRM tool for a small business in real estate, that query is ridiculously long. And for years marketers did not create content that went after that long of a keyword because in Ahrefs, SEMrush, all these tools, it told us that there was zero volume. So no one created it.
But you know who did? Users. Users went to Reddit and they asked those exact same questions. And now that that question was answered on Reddit by 40 different people who are all anonymous, Google is citing that content and ranking it in the search. To me, that screams opportunity because we all know that the long tail is also what's influencing LLM visibility. So when you are looking at the way in which a query fanning out is happening and people are saying, what's the best CRM for me? What a lot of people aren't realizing yet is that inside of the LLM, while that might be your prompt, there's memory. And the memory within the LLM knows that you work in a real estate company and knows that you're in Philadelphia. It knows that your budget is X, Y, and Z. And it knows that you told it a few weeks ago that your revenue was 2 million a year. So it's going to tailor the query around all of that data and do multiple of them. And guess what shows up? Reddit. Because Reddit has so many long-tail queries. So that to me was one of the biggest light bulb moments where it became clear that one, yeah, we should have all been doing Reddit marketing probably five years ago. But two, the second best time to do it is probably now. And we should either be one, trying to inspire content on Reddit, two, being active and engage and respond on Reddit, or maybe we start thinking holistically around, can we actually run ads on Reddit? Because people are landing on these pages anyway.
Jon Clark (14:13)
I was curious your thoughts on like, were these conversations always happening on Reddit or was the elevation of their visibility in search just amplifying where people were going to have these conversations? Do you know what I mean?
Ross Simmonds (14:28)
Yeah, I think the answers have always been happening. The conversations and questions have always been asked on Reddit, but not to the scale in which they are today. So they used to happen, but the volume was lower. I think what happened since Google announced the partnership with Reddit, the visibility of Reddit has become so high that usage has gone up, but also marketers have caught on. So we have two dynamics happening. One, we have an increase in usage, which is resulting in more UGC content. But then we're also seeing marketers say, wait, what in the world is going on? These Reddit threads from three years ago calling my project spam or trash or garbage is ranking right under my website. All the marketers are losing their mind. They're all frustrated. They want to yell at Reddit. They hate Reddit, but they're scared. They don't want to get yelled at. They're like, how do we fix this? How do we fix this? So they started creating more content too. And then they get banned and blocked because they don't know how to do it. I think those two things are driving an increase in the usage. But I think a lot of the questions and the conversations were happening from the beginning. It just wasn't so prominent because the Google partnership wasn't there. Redditors knew it existed. Redditors were seeing it and engaging and interacting, but the rest of the world was not because Google didn't surface Reddit as heavily as it does today.
Joe (15:55)
You were an early advocate for Reddit. I know you've been kicked off of Reddit more than once. So maybe other marketers and clients get to learn from your mistakes. You give a lot of practical advice too, which I think is great about the content you put out there. I saw one suggestion you gave where you own a company, you've got to find some employees willing to put their first name out there, creating maybe a secondary Reddit profile just to speak on behalf of the company. I mean, could you just talk a little bit about not being anonymous, being a little bit more comfortable not being anonymous on Reddit?
Ross Simmonds (16:45)
Yeah, so Reddit was built for people by people, so to speak. When people go on Reddit, they're looking for feedback from other people. They're very anti-corporate. Redditors hate brands. There's subreddits that literally are anti-brand and they call out brands. Lots of improvements have happened. Reddit is way less hostile to businesses today than it was when I first got started. When I first got started, it was like 2018, I was writing books about how to do marketing on Reddit and Redditors were yelling at me. I was starting to get banned a lot, it was rough. Now I work with Reddit closely, there's a lot of things going on that have changed since then. But that suggestion around having a personified account is key. The reason is right back to where we started. People do business with people. And when you go in and you're just a name, just a logo, people will scream you're just spamming, you're blocking this community, you're not adding value to this community, you need to go. So what I advise folks to do is think about three different types of accounts that brands should have. One is a subreddit, reddit.com/r/yourbrandname. You need to create that last. If you do not have your brand subreddit, that is the most important thing that I recommend you do because if somebody else claims it and owns it, you lose complete control. If your subreddit already exists, slide in the DMs of the mod and ask the mod if they would be okay with you becoming a co-mod with them. You have to do that carefully too. A lot of these mods have a lot of ego, have a lot of relationship with your brand. They are deeply connected to it. They might've been the first person to care about your brand. Some of them might be ex-employees, then it's really messy. So I hope you got off on good terms with that individual, but you want to send them a note and try to get access. Then there's two other accounts. One is the brand account, reddit.com/u/yourbrandname. So that u means user. These accounts are what should represent the brand at large. This account is the one that represents the macro of your brand. It's going to show up only when people are saying nice things. You're not getting into fights with your brand account. Your brand account is responding to say thank you. It's responding to say, we're so glad that you enjoyed our software, we're so grateful. You're not using the brand account to plug yourself, it's just a gratitude community manager style account. People are also going to DM that account, so you'd want to monitor the DMs because that's where revenue actually happens too. We have one client who had a 50K project sit in their DMs because nobody was opening it, and it was just somebody who wanted to onboard to their software and they found them through Reddit. Absolutely wild. The third account is the personified one, Joe, that you were talking about. This is where there is a human that is representing the brand showing up in the different subreddits where your community exists. So that account is going to show up when people are complaining, when people have problems. They're going to also show up when people are asking questions about things that are parallel to your offering, but might not be exactly what you do. What do I mean? Let's use the CRM example just to keep it easy. If I'm Ross from Acme CRM on Reddit and I see in r/sales, which is a subreddit dedicated to sales professionals, someone is saying, what are the best movies that I should watch if I'm in sales? I'm going into that subreddit as Ross from Acme CRM and I'm going to say you should watch Boiler Room, it's a great movie. I'm going to say maybe you should also watch Remember the Titans to understand camaraderie amongst friends. It's also just my own personal favorite movie. But you go in with these types of responses and then you start to build up karma. So you're not always going in to sell. Sometimes you're just trying to build trust in the community. So you answer with that type of response, maybe you throw in a GIF, maybe you make a joke and you say the last movie that you want to watch is The Social Network, there's no reason to watch that. People laugh, they think it's funny, you get more karma. Karma gives you permission to now go into multiple subreddits and contribute because some subreddits are not going to let you in unless you have a certain level of karma to actually be engaged. Those are the three accounts. I went down a masterclass on how to set it up and what to do, but those are the three ways that I would approach folks to think about Reddit.
Jon Clark (21:08)
I was going to ask if you had any tips around the karma side. We had Nick LeRoy on almost a year and a half ago now, and he mentioned how he had acquired a thread because it had been expired. And I thought that was fascinating. So I started playing around with that as well and found all the karma requirements in order to make that happen. Is it purely just commenting? Is it getting those engagements and awards and things like that?
Ross Simmonds (21:32)
It is getting those, but the key is understanding content-market fit. So I believe that every single community, every single subreddit can give you hints on what it wants. And it's up to you as a Redditor to give them what they want. And the easy way to find out what people want is to sort the content by top posts of all time. So you go into any subreddit. I am confident I can go viral in any community. If it's about dad life, it's about mom life. You can give me HVAC, you can give me people talking about plumbing, you can give me people talking about sweaters, anything. You can go viral. You sort the content by top posts, you look at content that's four to five years old. You're going to understand the trend amongst that content and what actually got people talking. Why did this resonate so deeply with people? Then the light bulb should go off. This is old, no one has seen this for four years. Let me recycle this, make it a little bit better, make it more up to date, and then give it back to them. And that content always works. Unless you get too cute and you're like, I'm going to modify this because I'm so creative and I can do things differently. Then it falls flat. I tried this the other day. I went into r/FoodNYC and again, I went into a whole different world. I'm a B2B guy, I was like, let me see if I can recreate a pizza post about the best pizza in New York and then do it for a small little town in Canada. Reverse engineered the post, I reposted it, I got like 80 comments, like 900 upvotes. Someone sent me good karma gold and I didn't get banned because I reverse engineered what works and I gave it to a different community. Everyone thinks that people are so complex when in reality we all are just into educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering content. You give us that stuff and we will love it. It's why the movies that work in one region can work in the other. It's why Squid Game is just a modification of a bunch of other movies and books that have been written over the years. Shakespeare still lives through Disney. Everyone thinks that Lion King is new, it looks just like Macbeth to me. All of these stories are just remixes of the past and we just keep eating them up. So why wouldn't people eat up the same Reddit content from five years ago?
Jon Clark (23:53)
I'm not going to lie, I had a really strong LinkedIn post that I published almost exactly a year ago and it was around algorithm updates. And I literally grabbed the same exact post and just published it on Saturday and it's got like 250 likes, 26 reshares, and I changed one sentence.
Ross Simmonds (24:12)
Right? Create Once, Distribute Forever. It's like that idea works.
Jon Clark (24:13)
Incredible, incredible. So you mentioned going viral. Tell us what it's like to hit the homepage. What happens to your DM box, first of all?
Ross Simmonds (24:22)
So the first time it happened, it broke the website. The website just went down. So that was a disaster. But this was back in the day. Links are way harder now. But back then it was a link and it crashed the site. Absolutely crashed the site. I forget what they used to call it. It was the Reddit hug of death, I think they called it, where Reddit loves your content so much that it crashes your site. So that was the first piece. And that's turmoil because then you're thinking from the moment it crashed to the time we get it back up, we're losing revenue, we're losing opportunities. So that was bad. The DMs get it's a cool spike. We've had a lot of front-page success on Reddit. One that still pays dividends today, which I don't think pays dividends always from a financial lens, but it's just a cool indication to me that this thing works and has staying power, is I put up a post when I was like 27 years old and I was transparent about how I was able to make my first quarter million in freelance revenue as a freelancer. And I broke it all down. I went into FreshBooks, which I was using at the time, to screenshot my accounts. I was showing people everything because, again, I reverse engineered what people wanted in r/entrepreneur and then I gave it to them. And still today, I will get DMs from folks who are fresh out of school and they're like, I want to be a freelancer someday, I've seen your thread. And I'm like, yeah, that was a long time ago. And they're like, can you give me some advice? And I'm like, okay, let me go back mentally to then and try to give you some good advice. So it's cool to me that the staying power lasts if you create good content. It can truly stick around for a very long time. The blip at the beginning is a rush, like the front page, you'll have trolls, you'll have haters, you'll have people who say you're lying. That's okay, just embrace that. But it dies down, but it still trickles in, which is kind of cool to see.
Jon Clark (26:13)
I'm curious about the structure of a post. So if you're sharing something on Reddit, are you formatting it? I know each subreddit has very strict rules around whether you can include images, links, all those sorts of things, but are you focused on bullet point lists? Like we talk about SEO content or AEO content, and there's all these components of it. Is it the same for Reddit?
Ross Simmonds (26:35)
It used to be, but now with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, et cetera, you want to make your content not sound like it was written with AI. I think the biggest mistake that a lot of folks are making today is that they're copying and pasting ChatGPT responses directly into Reddit. Not realizing that Reddit is one of the most sophisticated platforms I think at even catching AI content, where if you paste an essay directly in a box on Reddit, it's tracking that behavior and then saying you wrote this in 10 seconds, that's not possible.
Jon Clark (27:07)
Interesting. So literally the copy and paste action is a giveaway.
Ross Simmonds (27:12)
It's a giveaway. Like, sit there, paste it and then just sit there for a second. Just paste it in and wait and then hit the send button. Because when you're going from thread to thread, just reply, reply, reply. That's a fast track to getting banned. Don't do that. That's a massive mistake. And find a way, if you're using Claude or one of these tools, to create an AI-isms MD file or memory or document that cleans everything before you get the end result, so it doesn't sound like AI. So you need to train your AI to say, I do not say it's not this, it's that, because all the AIs in the ever-evolving world, we never say that, that can never be written. The bold random sections cannot be written in your AI. Exactly, like you have to train your LLM to not sound like an AI if you're going to use that path. But formatting is still important. But my biggest piece of advice to folks has changed. It used to be make your Reddit posts so well formatted and structured that people are grateful just that you took the time to do that. Now my recommendation is to format it well, but make sure you have some typos in it. Make sure that you aren't using correct grammar. Make sure that you're not always capitalizing your words and make sure that you have run-on sentences that don't actually make sense. Like that's my recommendation now.
Joe (28:36)
This is music to the ears of everyone who struggles with spelling.
Ross Simmonds (28:43)
Right. And it's a nightmare to everyone who believes that brand voice needs to be a certain way. Like it's great for those of us who are like, let's be scrappy, but it's an absolute nightmare for the enterprise brand that's publicly traded and has a legal team that wants to review everything before it hits it. Absolute nightmare.
Jon Clark (29:05)
Maybe we can shift into, I love how you frame it, GEO, AEO, EIEIO, whatever the acronym is. You published an amazing guide, I think it was last month, we'll link to it in the show notes. But yeah, how are you thinking about the age of content that we're in today? I mean, content is so easily created and you've sort of built this system around resharing and republishing basically anything that you create, which has been amazing. And I would imagine that for folks trying to replicate that is a big part of what they're trying to do now. How do you think about keeping things unique enough to sort of stand out when you're pushing the same type of content or the same message out over all these platforms sort of iteratively?
Ross Simmonds (29:50)
Yeah, I think for a lot of brands, the biggest shift that needs to happen is that they need to get off of the create, create, create cycle. And they now need to shift entirely to a distribute and optimize cycle, which they weren't really in, which I'm excited for because it's what we should have been doing in the first place. Like a lot of us got into the trap of let's create a content calendar, let's make a few technical updates on our site, and that's our retainer. We're going to do this for you every month. And then we're going to send you some reports to show that these landing pages and blog posts are driving more organic traffic and that's leading to pipeline and this is all good. I am a student of marketing before I am a student of SEO, social media, LLM visibility. I'm a student of marketing. And I believe that as marketers, we should have always been thinking holistically around the fact that search is not just Google, that search is YouTube. I've been trying to preach for years that Google owns this site called YouTube and more people are willing to go to the movie theater than read books. But our strategy is all about the written word, but nobody reads anymore. What are we talking about? And as a dad, I hate it, but it's reality. People would way rather watch a movie than read the book originally. That's the reality. So as a search professional, I think we need to, and I think it's an actual saving grace. I think search in general is in a very beautiful time. And those who embrace it are going to have thriving, great careers that will potentially help future generations for their life in a massive way. If we can pivot out of this box that we were put into as search professionals into the bigger bucket of brand marketing, social content, it's a good thing guys. Everyone will be better off for it. So how do we keep it creative? I believe that we need to do research too. I think it's important to do research with your customers. I think it's important to show up and ask questions. I think what you guys are doing with the podcast is a great example of how to do that. We as professionals need to be open to having conversations with each other to discuss ideas, we need to stay on top of it by learning from our peers and from our colleagues. And by doing so, we all are forced to get better. And that's the beauty that I fell in love with in the industry many years ago was like, I would go on to communities like growthhackers.com, inbound.org, all of these different spaces and just see industry legends at the time share their ideas so freely. I was like, I can make this thing work from my parents' basement. This is cool. That's what I want for everyone in the industry. And I think when folks like you all are putting out a podcast like this, when we see people putting out YouTube videos, the way that we are able as a profession to stay creative is to give away all of our ideas. Because when everybody has our ideas, the only way to win is to keep doing more, to keep finding new opportunities to get better. That's why I'm so open to sharing all of my strategies because I'd get bored if I was like, yeah, I'm going to gatekeep all of my ideas for myself, not give them to anybody, I'm just going to keep doing them. It forces me to be like, okay, the market's caught on now, I need to go find what's next. And I think that's the beauty of this game. Marketing changes, people are changing, behaviors change. Let's keep changing.
Joe (33:17)
It's critical to the success of a marketer to stay on top of the change. I wonder if I could ask you a question around format choices and timeliness. I think our audience knows you published Create Once, Distribute Forever a couple of years ago. The book format is a really big investment in undertaking. The GEO guide that Jon just referenced, also probably a pretty big undertaking, not the level of investment as your book, but there are different ways to put content out there. The investment is different, and the timeliness piece, does that influence what format you choose? Like the book you wrote two years ago still makes sense, but maybe the GEO guide that you made, maybe that only lives for six months. So how do you make the formatting decision? You want to be timely because your audience wants up to date. Your audience is looking for you to teach them what's happening right now and what could be coming next. How do you choose which format?
Ross Simmonds (34:13)
Yeah, I like to think of every piece of content that I create as an investment. I fell in love with investing when I was in university. I bought some stock, I'm not going to say what, and it tanked. And I learned a very hard lesson. I should have done research, I should have studied it. I graduated during the early recession and it was an absolute disaster. But I got back and then I made some other ones and they were good. But the key point is, if we as marketers start thinking about every single asset that we create as an investment, we start to recognize that every investment comes with different types of risk. A tweet is low risk. A LinkedIn post, low risk. There's not a lot of energy that goes into creating it. However, the reward for those assets can be high. They can pay great dividends. Me taking time out of my day to write a blog post, let's say that takes me three hours. Three hours when I was 20 wasn't a lot of energy, it didn't matter. Now three hours, I'm like, okay, this is an investment. I'm going to take three hours out of my day to write this blog post, it better pay some type of dividends back to me. A book is one of the hardest things I've ever done. I think it is the hardest creation I've ever done. Writing a book was the hardest thing I ever created on the internet from a content lens. Creating a business is also very hard, but creating a book was very difficult. So the ROI of that and the longevity of that needs to be significant. I need to be able to say I'm going to take this asset, I'm going to put it in the arms of clients, I'm going to put it in the hands of potential partners, prospects, I'm going to sell it online, I'm going to promote it, try to get it in the hands of people who could eventually pay for our services. I think about it all as an investment that might come back in some way in the future. An e-book might take a week of work. Okay, what do I need for this to feel like it's been an ROI effort? It's the same thinking that I would apply to even client work. Like, before you start to say we should invest in a calculator, what's the ROI of that? What's the risk? The risk is that nobody ever uses your calculator and you put a bunch of engineering effort into it and it's worth nothing. Now, thanks to Claude Code and Replit and Lovable and all these tools, you can do it cheaper now, which is cool. But you always should have that perspective of like, what is the ROI out of this? And here's the beauty. It's going to be different for every single business or every single creator. So what takes me two hours might take someone else five. What takes someone five might take me 20. I know some folks who can get on a camera and they can crush out like 50 videos in three to four hours. It takes me a full day. I can't do it in a half day. It'll take me a full day to do that type of effort. So everybody's skills are different, everybody's value is different, what they're selling is different. Like all of those things matter and have to come into the consideration when you're thinking about the format that you want to create.
Jon Clark (37:14)
You talked a lot about all that goes into that. I imagine the team probably helps with some of those things, like the e-book, for example. And you've referenced agencies that are 100 people will probably operate with 20 in the future. I guess, is that impacting your particular company in that way? Are you thinking about, well, maybe I don't need to hire that person, maybe I can just build a system here? Or is it influencing price? You know you had a great podcast with Mike a couple of weeks ago and there was some discussion around just what our value is in the industry, right? I think that's accelerating. So how is AI affecting or impacting the way that you think about running your own business?
Ross Simmonds (37:54)
It's definitely impacting both the cost and the price. I think for both sides of the business, we're embracing AI. So when it comes to internal, we've been able to leverage AI to be able to simply do more than we ever could before. Operationalized tasks, faster. Get to decisions, faster. Get data out of things that were a challenge before, faster. Create reports, faster. Proposals, faster. Decks, faster. Emails, faster. I think every agency should be committing to seeing 15% faster outputs every quarter or they're missing out. If you're not able to do today 20% more than you could last year, I am sorry. I don't know where you've gone wrong, but you have gone wrong. There is no question in my mind that everyone should be able to do things faster than they ever could before because of this technology.
And I know a lot of people shied away from it. And some of them might still be shying away from it, which is my opportunity. But the ability to move faster is very real. We're still hiring though. We are not slowing down on the idea of hiring great talent. We want brilliant people because I'm a believer that you can give me an AI tool and ask me to create a seven-course meal and it's still going to be pretty bad. But if you give a chef an AI tool and ask them to come up with a seven-course meal, it's going to be way better than what I could create. So if you give great people AI, you get great outputs. If you give good people AI, you get good outputs faster. If you give somebody who's bad AI, you get more bad things just faster. So to me, I think you still and we still as professionals, executives, should strive to be the best version of ourselves. I was speaking at a school the other day and this kid was saying, like, do I need to still do math when I can just use an AI? And I was like, my goodness. You can't know if the AI is right if you don't know math, you need to know if the math equation is correct. So you still need to know that. And the same thing works with AI. Like if you do not understand SEO and you're thinking I can just have Claude do my keyword research without actually plugging it into any data, like we did this analysis too. We asked ChatGPT how to do an estimate on the keyword volume for a wide range of different terms. It was off by like 10X versus the data that was in SEMrush and Ahrefs. So all of these gurus online say fire your agency, fire your social tool. What are we talking about? No, hallucinations are real, but you need an expert to be able to see that and say, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. So we're not not hiring. We think that hiring great people attracts great talent. A lot of the big Holdcos are laying off tons of great people. If any of them are listening to this and they want a great place to join, give us a shout. But I believe it's an opportunity. And then on the other side for servicing clients, we can just add way more value now. We can add so much more value to do things that we always wanted to but may not have had the resources to do before. Which has been beautiful because the clients are loving it. Their price isn't going up, but the value is going up, which makes them more sticky and it makes it easier for them to sign on for another 6 or 12 months, which is great for us.
Jon Clark (41:16)
It's a lot of fun to share a new tool that we've been building internally with a client for the first time and they're just glued to the screen. It's been a lot of fun. You're right. I wanted to circle back to Reddit real quick, because I wanted to ask a question. You mentioned something around Reddit's visibility on these longer-tail terms and terms that tend to be very high cost from a CPC, like a traditional Google ads perspective. And you mentioned something about, you know, should we buy Reddit ads to make sure that we're there? Does your team do Reddit ads? Do you have any tips on the Reddit paid side of things? Because I know very similar to participating in the conversation itself, there's a lot of risk with how you put an ad out. So do you have any thoughts or tips there?
Ross Simmonds (42:02)
So yeah, we've been doing a lot of great work with the blend of the two. So organic and paid brought together is a beautiful thing. We've been doing work with Bitly, for example, where we've been running ads on Reddit while also running an organic program with them. And the key is to, again, embrace insights from organic to create your ads. Redditors hate LinkedIn ads. Redditors hate Google ads. If your ads look like ads and they're not Redditized, no one's going to click on them. So what you want to do is embrace the idea of having conversational tone, throw in a meme, but don't get too meme-y. You don't want to have something that doesn't actually connect with the culture that you're trying to influence. You actually have to understand the nuances of when a meme makes no sense. You don't want to be the "Okay Boomer". When you start getting comments that are like "Okay Boomer", then you know you've failed. So you need to find that sweet spot with your ad creative.
And again, I think the best way to do that, we did this one campaign with the client who was targeting MSPs, so managed service providers. And we sorted the content by top posts and we found this post that was created, I think back in 2019, which was simply a Google spreadsheet and it had all of the top tools for MSPs trying to grow their business or something like that. It was created in like 2019. So we're like, cool, this is gold. It's gold because we can recreate that today with new tools, with AI tools, and give this back to them, but run an ad and use that as lead gen. And we know what's going to work because look how they responded to it years ago because of the same type of people. So we run variations with different copy, cost per lead is low, lower than all the other platforms. And it's just thriving because we embraced organic to inspire paid. So that's my biggest piece of advice to folks is if you can't get budget to do organic, at the very least, get budget to research what's worked from an organic lens and then use paid to put that in front of your Redditors.
Jon Clark (44:03)
Super smart. Last question on Reddit, I know we're closing in on time. So when you're doing that research, you go to a subreddit, you're digging through all the comments, you're sorting by oldest to try to see what worked in the past. Is it all manual or do you have...
Ross Simmonds (44:21)
Jon, it used to be. You guys should have seen my spreadsheets back in the day. I used to go line by line and take the titles and write them and paste them over. I used to check how many upvotes they had, I would write the number. I used to check the comments, I would write the number of comments, and I would go line by line. Now with AI, you just lazy-load it all up, let the load play out, copy, paste, hey Claude, review this, understand this. Make sure you say please and thank you so the LLM doesn't come and get you someday. Then you get the response, then you say turn it into a spreadsheet, and then you're done. So I use AI now to support it. Always make sure that it does another QA, all that stuff, cross check it, but AI makes it way easier now than it used to be in the past. And then you can even say, show me the trends. What are the trends that you're seeing in this? And it will say post number four, five, six, and seven were all about this. And you can say, cool, this is what I need to give this community.
Jon Clark (45:20)
So you're literally copying, dragging your mouse down, taking that, putting it into a text file or literally right into the LLM.
Ross Simmonds (45:28)
Yeah, I used to use the API. That's become a bit of a nightmare. No shade towards my friends at Reddit, but the API is becoming a little bit much. So now it's copy and paste.
Joe (45:48)
I want to squeeze one more in, not Reddit related at all, but Foundation is kind of known for content marketing, distributing content on behalf of clients. The distribution part has gotten more nuanced with answer engines. And I'm just curious as an agency owner to agency owner, are you changing the way you staff projects or have you had to change the pricing at all because it's a more complicated set of responsibilities?
Ross Simmonds (46:15)
So we haven't had to change pricing much. The biggest shift is that more of what we do is becoming more relevant versus just certain layers of it. So in the past, there was a lot of demand around just the creation side. And Foundation is that cool company that talks a lot about distribution, but maybe I'm not bought into Reddit, not bought into YouTube. LinkedIn, our in-house team can handle that. But now it's: you folk get distribution, and AI visibility is all about distribution, can you just do the whole thing? And that has resulted in a more holistic offering, which we've always done, except now the demand for the whole picture is much clearer to people. People actually believe us when we say YouTube matters. People actually believe us when we say this little site called Reddit where they're talking about you matters. Before it was a nice-to-have. So I would say distribution has gone from vitamin to painkiller. And that has been absolutely game changing for us.
Joe (47:13)
It's like an entire ecosystem that you have now where you have permission to kind of work across channels and platforms. What do you call it? What do you call this service? Are you still just calling it content marketing and distribution or is it something else?
Ross Simmonds (47:29)
AISEO, GEO, LLM visibility, distribution, AIO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, we will call it that, but it's marketing. It is marketing. It is marketing. It is marketing. However, during the times in which we live, I will call it whatever a client wants me to call it to make sure that they can get the value out of it and convince the leadership teams that they report to that it's worthwhile. But I think for all of us, the opportunity is real. And I think one of the things that I would say is a nuance that internally as an SEO we should all embrace is the fact that yes, SEO is not dying. It's not dead. It's still super important. It will always be important. But we have to respond with the market. If the market is saying that they want LLM visibility, then let's have the conversation because remember, Google and Gemini are one and the same folks. So we need to be thinking about AI mode either way. So let's just lean into it and embrace it and get back to marketing, which is cool.
Jon Clark (48:35)
It's always been marketing, right? The tactics have just changed a little bit. All right, let's wrap up with a couple rapid fires. What is more valuable in 2026: 10,000 email subscribers or a thousand karma on a relevant subreddit?
Ross Simmonds (48:54)
I'm old fashioned and old school, I'm going to still say emails. Emails are still the most valuable asset that you can have on the internet because if Google and Reddit's partnership doesn't extend two years from now, this whole thing changes.
Jon Clark (49:06)
Got it. Yeah, I love that. What's one AI tool you use every day?
Ross Simmonds (49:10)
So Fathom is a note-taking tool that shows up on your calls. I use that every day. It's a great way for me to stay on track and have conversations. Let me throw you one more: Whisper. I can move so fast now with voice AI. So Whisper, you press a button on your computer and you just speak and it will transcribe your words. Whether you're in Slack, whether you're in terminal, when I'm writing code, I'm not even writing code, I'm voicing code. Whisper has been great too.
Joe (49:35)
Can you think of a Reddit comment that changed your mind on something?
Ross Simmonds (49:39)
So this is going to be my Canadian side, but I thought that you should never put tomatoes on a donair, but I was changed. My mind was changed on Reddit. They gave me a case, I tried it that evening and it was delicious. Yeah, exactly.
Joe (50:01)
Kebabs, kebabs.
Jon Clark (50:05)
Let's see. Stephen King's On Writing is your favorite book. What's the writing rule from Stephen King that you think every marketer should follow?
Ross Simmonds (50:14)
All of them. That's it. I don't know. So here's a hot take. If you're writing for the internet and you haven't read On Writing, I think you're making a mistake for your career. Period. I don't think any writer should operate from this moment that they hear my voice on without reading it. Period. Hot take.
Joe (50:35)
You're a B2B marketer and you find a great subreddit, you join it. How long do you lurk before you contribute?
Ross Simmonds (50:55)
I'm probably going to lurk for a day or two. I'm going to sit back, understand the culture, understand the community, how are people responding, do the sort content by top posts. Then I'm going to find something that I can actually add value to. You don't go in just with a weak comment. Go in, pretend that it's like your first date and you need to make a good impression. And the first comment that you drop needs to be like "Mic drop, how good was that?" That's how you should feel when you drop it in.
Jon Clark (51:22)
I discovered the Action-Driven Podcast that you did with Talia Wolf. When are you bringing that back? That was awesome.
Ross Simmonds (51:30)
That's a throwback. That was when I had no hair, no babies. We had some fun on that podcast. We were very focused on just giving folks actionable tips. We might have to bring it back. I'll drop Talia a note and see if we can do it.
Jon Clark (51:49)
But a real question off of that: those podcasts were 15 to 18 minutes. The Ross Simmonds Show is anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. There was another one that I discovered, Reimagined, that was between 10 and 15 minutes. What is the ideal length for a podcast? Is there an ideal length? Joe and I talk about this all the time, because ours tend to be long form.
Ross Simmonds (52:14)
I think it depends on your audience and your goals. So it goes back to what Joe was mentioning earlier around format and ROI on the asset that's being developed. If I'm going after an early marketer, someone who's early in their career, I'm going short because I think that they want immediate action-driven content, they want the quick pace. If you're going upmarket where you're trying to talk to C-suite, they want to be able to digest a lot of thoughts. They want to be able to digest and know that you have depth. They want to be able to feel like they're really getting a lot. If you are going long form and you're targeting a younger demographic, I think it becomes a parasocial-style podcast format that they resonate with, where it's like they want to know who you are as a human. They want to know the social side. They want to know what your vibe is, your aura, your energy, they care about that more. While more of the senior folks, or at least maybe this is just me: let's just get to the good stuff. Let's just get to the nuggets that I can use to be better at X, Y, and Z so I can keep moving forward. So it depends on the brand, the business, the goals, the clients, the audience. As always: the marketing. Good marketers will say this: it depends.
Jon Clark (53:25)
Love that. All right, let's end there, Ross. This has been awesome. I know Joe and I could probably talk to you for another hour at least. But I think you're speaking at SEO Week if I remember correctly. Let everybody know where they can find you and I don't know if you want to tease what you're going to be talking about.
Ross Simmonds (53:45)
My name is Ross Simmonds. If you haven't caught that yet, I'm available online on all your platforms. You can do a quick search for me, but RossSimmonds.com is where I have my personal site. FoundationInc.co is our company's website. I also launched a business called Distribution AI that helps brands put their content engines on autopilot. And I will be at SEO Week talking about memory and how organizations, businesses and brands should be thinking about the stories they tell to influence the memory of our target audiences, LLMs, and how we should be trying to tackle that. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm also going to bring a bunch of new research that I've been doing on things like Reddit. But Jon, Joe, thank you guys for having me. I want to give you guys your flowers and your kudos for having so many episodes, adding so much value to the industry, the culture, the space at large. It's super important that we continue to add value to the industry like folks did for us when we were just getting started. So my hat's off to both of you for having me on and I hope folks got a lot out of this today.
Jon Clark (54:38)
Yeah, likewise. I mean, we're loving everything you're putting out. So I'm excited to see what you do next. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Page 2 Podcast. For those listening, if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate and review. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.