Reddit and Perplexity got us leads faster than Google ever did We used to play the SEO game. Write blog Wait 3 months Maybe rank Maybe convert What actually happened at 8 early-stage AI startups (Series A or earlier): -Google Page 1 took ~94 days - Organic CTR: 2.6% - First qualified lead: 6–8 weeks So we ditched the playbook. We asked one question: How fast can we show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity what tool to use? Turns out… faster than Google. And yeah, it brought pipeline. What changed when we went LLM-first: - Perplexity picked up our content in under 48 hours - ChatGPT (with Browsing) indexed feature pages in 3 days - 18.2% of sessions now come from LLM-originated paths - Those leads convert 2.4x better than blog traffic Then Reddit unlocked another level. We posted no-link, technical breakdowns here. One of them (about how we automated an AI agent pipeline) got quoted by Perplexity in: - “UX AI Agent” - “Best Firecrawl alternatives” - “How to track LLM bots” No push. No SEO. Just built in public. 3 days later: - 9 Perplexity query quotes - 2 inbound leads mentioned us directly Reddit is training data goldmine for LLMs. Here's what worked for us: 1. Add Q&A blocks to product pages (all <40 words) Example: Q: How does FireGEO detect ClaudeBot? A: It fingerprints known Anthropic headers and reverse-DNS matches IP blocks like 2600:1f18::/32 - Indexed by Perplexity in <48 hours - 11 bot hits in 5 days - 1 lead → trial signup in <1 week 2. Build an ai-sitemap.xml Only high-signal pages: - API docs - Feature comparisons - Pricing breakdowns - Tech specs Crawl rate = 2.3x higher than default sitemap. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot show up daily in logs. 3. Treat Reddit as an input layer We post raw content here before it hits our blog. In last 30 days: - ~30,000 views across Reddit - 9 quotes in Perplexity answers - 2 leads directly from those mentions If you’re shipping something real, try this: - Install FireGEO or track LLM bots via reverse DNS + ASN logs - Create llm.txt for structured answers - Tag LLM traffic with UTMs and route to CRM Curious to know what’s working for you around LLM visibility? Any tactics or insights others here are seeing? |