Tobias Fischer founded HigherUp Digital (B2B Tech Agency), Sermondo (Enterprise Tech Media), and is VP Marketing at Euvic US (Software Dev).gettyAsk ChatGPT or Perplexity a buying question today, and there's a good chance the answer points to a Reddit thread instead of a vendor's website. This is happening even in B2B tech, software and industrial.That's not a glitch. It's how these systems are built to work now.A study tracking over 680 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude found Reddit on top across every model, making up roughly 40% of all citations.Reddit's citation share grew at least 73% between October 2025 and January 2026, and Perplexity alone pulled nearly a quarter of its citations from Reddit in one month.Google has leaned into this, too: In May 2026, AI Overviews started pulling direct quotes from Reddit threads into search results, with the original poster's name attached. For B2B tech, this matters more than the headline numbers suggest. B2B buyers' searches now trigger an AI Overview 82% of the time, more than double the rate from a year earlier. Most B2B research now happens inside a system that would rather quote a stranger on Reddit than your own homepage.This isn't a small ranking shift. It's a different judge with different standards, and most enterprise tech companies are still dressing for the old one.1. When The Money Is There, But The Work Isn't Getting DoneEnterprises aren't ignoring this. A survey of over 250 senior marketing and digital leaders found 94% plan to increase AEO/GEO investment in 2026, and AI visibility ranked as the number one marketing priority for the year.But budget isn't the bottleneck. The same research shows that while AI visibility is the top goal, producing content at the scale AI engines need is the top challenge leaders report. Companies are buying dashboards to measure where they're invisible. Almost nobody is putting in the work each week to actually go participate in the places that earn citations—Reddit threads, podcast bookings, LinkedIn and YouTube posts and features in listicles/rankings.​2. Why Strangers Beat Your GEO StrategyNobody at OpenAI or Google has published the exact formula. But the pattern is consistent enough to draw a reasonable conclusion: AI systems often seem to trust a pile of independent opinions more than one company's claim about itself.Your website saying "we're the best" is one interested party talking.A dozen Reddit threads from people who've actually used the product look more like a consensus, and consensus is easier for a model to lean on.The data backs this up. Companies with a strong base of brand mentions on Reddit and Quora are roughly four times more likely to get cited by AI systems than companies with little community presence. ​3. Why You Shouldn't Bet Everything On RedditHere's the catch: This channel is volatile in a way old-school SEO never was. ChatGPT's Reddit citation share once dropped from about 60% of responses to 10% in a short period of time, before partly recovering, reportedly because OpenAI deliberately cut back on leaning so heavily on one source.The platforms don't even agree with each other: Reddit made up over 5% of ChatGPT's citations in January 2026 but just 0.1% of Gemini's in the same month.The lesson: Build presence across several formats, including Reddit, YouTube uploads, podcast appearances and LinkedIn posts, so one platform's algorithm change doesn't wipe out your visibility overnight.​One more format deserves a mention: the humble "best of" list. Listicles, articles and product pages are the three most-cited content formats across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Listicles alone account for 21.9% of citations, and they dominate commercial-intent queries specifically, showing up in roughly 40% of "best" and "top" searches, according to Wix Studio's AI Search Lab, which analyzed 75,000 AI answers and over a million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity.Through my platform Sermondo, I rank enterprise tech companies (services and software), based on research and interviews, so I am constantly in touch with firms investing in this format. It's working.​4. The Practical Fix: Five Honest Mentions A WeekYou don't need a content studio to close this gap. You need to show up regularly, where buyers are already asking questions, openly, as yourself (or have someone else do it for you).Start with five genuinely useful mentions a week, spread across the most relevant subreddits.Not five promotional posts—five real answers to real questions, from a named person who says who they work for. One documented test: a B2B SaaS company posted eight disclosed responses across select subreddits over three weeks. It produced six AI citations across ChatGPT and Perplexity, and the leads that came from it converted at roughly 2.4 times the rate of a parallel paid social campaign (the authors themselves call this directional, not a benchmark, given the small sample).Disclosure isn't a box to check; it's the whole point. AI platforms and Reddit's own community have both gotten better at spotting coordinated, undisclosed promotion. Get caught, and it doesn't just fail to earn you a citation. It could damage how both AI systems and real readers see your brand.The flip side is just as true: A real person, openly saying who they work for, reads as more credible, not less.5. Acting Before The Window ClosesThe data shows that AI overviews already dominate B2B tech search, and the brands a model settles on citing tend to keep getting cited; visibility compounds for whoever gets there first.The bottleneck isn't budget. It's showing up.Just start. It's fun, it's impactful and it's one of the most underrated opportunities in B2B marketing this year.Five honest conversations a week, in public, with your name on them, will do more than another AEO subscription.Combined with a human-first content strategy and enhanced through PR features and listicle inclusions, ​you'll likely start getting leads through AI search.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?