is reddit actually how ChatGPT decides what brands to recommend?
something weird happened with a client a few months back and i honestly still think about it.
we were dropping comments in reddit threads where their customers were already hanging out and asking questions. nothing groundbreaking. then one day someone on the team casually typed a category question into ChatGPT and the client's brand casually showed up unprompted. sitting right next to names with marketing budgets that dwarf ours.
so we dug into it and the pattern was kind of hard to ignore, the threads we commented in got indexed, a few were sitting on page one of google, and ChatGPT was apparently pulling from them when it put together its answers.
which got me thinking. is reddit lowkey the most important training ground for AI recommendations right now and most brands are just completely asleep on it? or did we just get lucky and the real drivers are somewhere else?
not trying to push a theory here, genuinely don't know. could be a coincidence. curious what this community has actually seen. has anyone tested this deliberately and measured it? what worked, what didn't, what just raised more questions?