Playbook · Competitor research
How to find the subreddits where your competitors are discussed
Guessing at subreddits wastes months. Your competitors have already been discussed somewhere specific, and those threads are exactly what buyers - and AI assistants - read before choosing. This is the six-step method to find them.
You can do the whole thing with the free Reddit brand audit, one competitor domain at a time.
The six-step method
1. List the three competitors your buyers actually name
Not the analyst-report list. The names that come up in sales calls and in your own churn interviews. Reddit conversation follows what buyers say to each other, not market share.
2. Run a free audit on each competitor's domain
Each report returns the subreddits that mention that brand, ranked by activity, plus the real threads with upvote and comment counts. Two minutes per competitor.
3. Find the overlap
Write the subreddits down. Any community that appears in two or more competitor reports is a community that decides your category. That overlap is your monitoring list.
4. Read the top threads before posting anything
Sort each report's threads by comments. Those are the recurring questions - the posts that keep ranking in Google and keep getting quoted by AI assistants. They tell you the objections you have to answer.
5. Set up alerts on the overlap, not the whole of Reddit
Subscribe to the RSS feed of each subreddit on your list and add keyword alerts for your brand and your competitors' names. You now hear about the conversations that matter within a day.
6. Re-check quarterly
Communities move. A subreddit that mattered a year ago can be dead, and a new one can own your category. Re-run the competitor audits every quarter and update the list.
The shortcut: start from a category ranking
If you would rather not guess who your competitors are, open the Reddit visibility leaderboard and filter to your category. Every brand there already has an audit page listing its subreddits and threads, so you can read your whole competitive set in one sitting.
Related reading
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