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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent (00:01.461)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Danny Kirk. He is the founder of ReddiReach Danny, go ahead, give us an introduction to yourself for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.
Danny Kirk (00:13.87)
Absolutely. Thanks very much for having me on, Brent. Yep. My name is Danny Kirk, founder of ReddiReach We focus on getting our clients' names dropped in AI search using Reddit marketing and AI search optimization. That's all by way of saying that when somebody shows up or goes to their favorite chat bot, OpenAI, Claude, whatever it might be, they ask about a certain product. We try to have our clients mentioned in that as part of it.
and what do I like to do besides that? You and I were just talking about endurance sports, so that's something I'm sure we'll ta touch on a little bit more.
Brent (00:50.017)
All right, that's awesome. So, Danny, before we get into content, we're gonna talk about hopefully this be about a 20-minute conversation, might go a little longer. I do this thing called the Free Joke Project. I'm gonna tell you a joke. You just give me a rating eight through 13. It's guaranteed, it's guaranteed to be a bad joke. So here we go. I got cast in a film about a bakery. It's not a huge part, just a small roll.
Danny Kirk (01:17.762)
Yeah yeah, that would b definitely be an eleven twelve range, I would say. Maybe not a thirteen, but pretty high up there. Yeah, pretty definitely up there.
Brent (01:21.153)
All right, good. Yeah, maybe a hundred K or a hundred mile race.
All right, good. yeah, just so the listeners know, Danny and I are both runners, and we're not going to talk about this whole thing on running. I my last guest was a Jack Russell owner, so I'm also a Jack Russell owner, and we did not spend any time talking about Jack Russell's. Anyways, let's talk a little bit about AI search. and Reddit, I think, is the one thing that really has been leaned on by a lot of the models. Tell us about
Maybe how you got into what you're doing and and and how how you help people.
Danny Kirk (02:02.092)
Yeah, absolutely. the longer version of that story or not too long is I have no education in marketing or business. I was actually a music major in college, but started stumbled into startups about 15 years ago, grew a couple of companies, a couple of failures, a few big wins, started this agency about a decade ago. We were big into the email marketing space, then got into search. and then kind of on the Reddit and AI search side of things, I've been a longtime Reddit user myself.
So I was able to kind of see what was coming from a long distance as far as AI's use of Reddit and how that would kind of influence search on the AI search side of things. So that's when we started offering organic Reddit marking to to our clients and then full AI search optimization, because Reddit is just one piece of the puzzle today.
Brent (02:53.481)
Yeah, so tell us, I mean, I guess most people know what Reddit is, but w why is Reddit such a good source of information for the LLMs?
Danny Kirk (03:01.762)
Yeah, the LLMs are buying Reddit's data because it is one of the greatest places to find tons of human data from very passionate people. And I mean that because Reddit organizes itself into subreddits. So you have all these topics, and each one of those topics is just its own little nation state around, you know, Jack Russell Terriers, Ultra Running, whatever it might be. And you just have these incredibly passionate people around those topic areas.
That are talking about products, about problems they have, all that jazz. And that's a great place to get human data for the LLMs to train off of because they have tons of data that they can pull from kind of fixed data sources, but this is ever evolving. It's changing every day and updating with the newest information. It's also an open website. So whereas some other platforms, even Twitter, you can't really necessarily see it and get the data unless you're logged in.
Anybody can go into Reddit and get that data. So that's how it kind of first started, just scraping Reddit for that data. And of course now OpenAI and Google have large partnerships directly with them.
Brent (04:07.041)
Do you think there's a mistake? I mean, I think Amazon has come out where said they're trying to block bots. Do you think it's a mistake by some of those bigger companies to try to block these these LLM bots from scraping them and missing out on that traffic opportunity?
Danny Kirk (04:21.794)
Yeah, it's it I you know, it's probably not binary, but is it more of a mistake than less of a mistake? I would say it's probably more of a mistake to do that, because they are gonna find the data somewhere and they're probably willing to pay for that data somewhere. So why not give a little bit of a taste, have their bots trained off of on it, and then maybe make some sort of partnership with it.
Brent (04:43.413)
Give us an example what you would advise a client. And let's just say I have a specialty running store and I specialize in downhill marathons. How would I go about putting putting d content into Reddit feeds to help myself be a seen as an expert on running downhill?
Danny Kirk (05:06.572)
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I would just search your brand name plus Reddit and Google or you know just enter in a search like that and see if you're even mentioned on Reddit. Sometimes if you're a big enough brand, you might already have some interaction on there from some customers. if so, that's great. Maybe just join the conversation even as the founder of your brand. you can, you know, put your name on there, put your company's name on there, be transparent and say, hey, I'm with the company.
Thanks for the feedback or for thanks for the love. Here's some resources if you might need them fitting those new downhill running shoes, whatever that is. if there aren't any mentions of your brand on there, you're gonna go wanna find out where your tribe lives. So it's likely you know, a running associated subreddit or maybe downhill running associated one, and just see what people are talking about, see what problems and solutions they're looking for.
And then join that conversation. You can either do it from a branded perspective, saying, hey, I'm from this company, or even from a non-branded perspective, just sharing publicly available information about your brand that is helpful to the reader, that is not salesy, that's just very value-add, and then mentioning your brand as part of that.
Brent (06:22.301)
is there and I I cringe at this idea, but I know there's ways to automate a lot of this and I and I'm a big LinkedIn user. I see people that have clearly made AI generated posts as as as comments. And I think there must be a statistic out there to see the length of the comment now and the amount of dashes in your comment has has must have been tripled by the since twenty twenty two. But is there a way to
to find that and and maybe help you as a brand to to make this the process easier. I'm trying to say it in a nice way.
Danny Kirk (07:00.174)
Yeah, for sure. There certainly are. But it sounds like we probably both aligned on this. Reputation takes a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. We all of our work is a hundred percent human. so there are tools out there and we use some of them to find things that you want to target, but as far as the doing the work, the writing, the content,
Reddit has an incentive to keep humans on their platform and bots off their platform. If they don't, they lose their business model and for 20 years they have been unprofitable and they're finally profitable. So they have incentive and we're actually seeing them crack down on automations. So our advice is use some of these tools. A great one. One of my buddies created is subreddit signals.com. Great tool. Helps you find those posts that you want to interact with, but then write all the comments yourself. Be a hundred percent human. Be genuine, be helpful. don't
let AI take that place, but you can certainly do it more efficiently with tools like that.
Brent (07:57.396)
And this is sarcastic, but should you then be very spiteful and mean when just joke at I I'm in a lot of subreddits and man, sometimes what people say is just crazy. How I guess so, you know, that my my main idea that on that question was how does how do you think the LLMs filter out all that garbage stuff that comes out of Reddit?
Danny Kirk (08:09.441)
It it it
Danny Kirk (08:19.778)
Yeah, I I imagine if the AI is good enough to write some of those things, that's probably also good enough to detect it. I imagine they have a way of detecting AI slop and they're able to filter out that from the human noise. Now of course AI can be trained to write not like AI, but that's kind of you know, I think getting better over time. But yeah, I think they have their own ways of detecting that and putting lower signal on that content.
Brent (08:48.691)
Right, yeah. I mean I'm I guess I'm specifically talking about like why would you ever run downhill? It's just gonna ruin your knees, you know, like all these stupid comments that people say that don't they don't know what they're talking about, but Reddit I mean that's not a bash on Reddit hour, but you know, there's like such a d a swing of of information that you can get and it's really have to put it through a filter and I would imagine they put the same kind of filter on.
Danny Kirk (08:54.231)
Danny Kirk (09:12.674)
Yeah, I I yeah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, I a couple things there. Reddit has upvotes and down votes. Obviously, I imagine AI is not putting a huge amount of weight on a very downvoted item. So they're they're yet again allowing the humans to kind of give the high signal to AI. And then another thing is is that for brands
Brent (09:27.573)
Mm.
Danny Kirk (09:37.035)
AI is gonna tell somebody something about your brand and it might not always have the correct information. So maybe that one person that ran downhill and they didn't mention that they already had an IT band problem and their knee was hurting the whole time and they blamed it on your shoes, even though it wasn't your shoes. being a part of AI search optimization is not just trying to be found in there, but also feeding AI correct information because it may already have an incorrect
Brent (09:43.519)
Mm.
Brent (09:53.953)
Mm-hmm.
Brent (10:04.437)
Mm-hmm.
Danny Kirk (10:07.274)
vision of your brand.
Brent (10:08.831)
Yeah. what was so you you focus you you focus mainly on Reddit, but he now Reddit or like Chat GPT is taking some emphasis off of Reddit or is that just th they're kind of spreading the love out to other platforms? Are you focusing on other platforms as well now?
Danny Kirk (10:26.402)
Yep, absolutely. With the full AI search optimization we do, that's kind of broad spectrum. you're totally correct. Back in September of last year, Google and OpenAI re kind of weighted their citations, and Reddit was around, and this is crazy, they were around 80% of all citations, which is way too high. That's absurd. now, on average, from the data I've seen, they're around 20% of all citations as a broad generalization.
I still think that is actually way too high. I imagine over time they'll settle maybe around 10% or even high single-digit percentages as we get more data sources out there. But of course, the other things with AI search outside of Reddit. So you have Reddit marketing, you have digital brand mentions broadly across the internet, PR, backlinks, all that jazz, content in a format that AI likes to read from your website, and then obviously optimizations to your website too.
Brent (11:24.243)
I know citations is a big part of what what AEO does. is the citation part of that involved with the backlink or is it just a mention of your brand that that's important in the citation?
Danny Kirk (11:38.563)
We see just the brand mention is the most important part, but that's not to say that the backlink is unimportant. You know, everyone is anybody that's talking about SEO is dead, that's just definitely not true. SEO is alive and well, SEO has just broadened, you know. whereas Google was kind of very narrow and what it needed to show to have your brand show up on page one, AI is a lot more diverse in its data sources. So it's
Brent (11:54.346)
Mm-hmm.
Danny Kirk (12:06.114)
Backlinks are still important. It's just a little bit different than that.
Brent (12:09.451)
If we flip back to what a lot of the merchants w are seeing, and we're hearing it from merchants that they are not getting the traffic or click-through rate that they had in the past because Google is, you know, especially Google is now just giving you the summary of the answers, and it's sometimes it's hard to figure out which link to click on in Google. How how are you advising them then to make sure that they that the product that they're eventually trying to sell?
is getting talked about but then they they're coming to their site to buy it.
Danny Kirk (12:43.438)
Yeah, for sure. You know, it's all about just kind of nailing these four pillars. First and foremost, if they're an e-commerce brand, having their website and also the schema of their products optimized in a way that LLMs and robot crawlers want to read. That's critical because without these small edits to their site, literally AI can't read it. so kind of that's very easy to do, and that's kind of the most important thing. And then from there.
yeah, maybe do a little Reddit marketing, find out where your tribe is in there, put out content that AI likes to read. It loves product roundups, it loves comparisons, all that jazz. Get more brand mentions on top-sided sites, and also use a AI search intel tool. So there's a bunch of them out there. we love Peekaboo. Excuse me, AIPeekaboo.com is a great one. There's of course big names like profoundpeak.ai.
Peekaboo is the one that we use most. And that will show you how you are ranking against other brands, your competitors, and where they're being cited, where you can also edge into.
Brent (13:49.44)
Yeah, that's super interesting. the the the places that they're writing, is is it is it more important that you're keeping up the content on your own site or are you trying to get content on other sites like Reddit was a great example, but as a brand, like say I'm selling I'm selling again running shoes.
I is it well let's say I'm well let's make it more complicated. I'm a specialty running store and I'm depending on Hoka or Nike to s to to send me traffic. is it more important to be in your local market and sell to that? Or I mean th there's places where you wanna be, right? Other than just social media.
Danny Kirk (14:33.268)
Absolutely. Specifically about the local stores. So there's a great, great store here in Salida, Colorado, where I'm at, 7,000 feet running store. And it's it's amazing. For local businesses, it's a little bit different. Definitely focus on the local Reddit aspect of it. Get Google reviews, it really loves. and then just be involved with that local SEO piece. so local appears to be a little bit different versus you're a large shoe company and get
traffic from all over the world. So local is a little bit different. It's kind of very similar to local SEO historically.
Brent (15:03.393)
Mm-hmm.
Brent (15:08.656)
what what are you excited about that's that we're seeing now in this trend more towards the L LMs? What what kind of tr things are you seeing that merchants should know about?
Danny Kirk (15:20.908)
Yeah, so obviously the and this is not new, this is several months old. So the testing out of one click buying in app with Chat GPT and other AI, that's huge. just imagine that maybe someday your customers don't actually go to your website. they have a chat with their favorite chat bot. maybe it lasts multiple days long, they finally get recommended three different brands, and yours is either one of them or it's not one of them, and they just buy right there.
So that's both very exciting and daunting to many brands, but something to pay attention to. Ads is also very interesting. We all know it's coming and it's already kind of begun to roll out in and Chat GPT. you know, can't say I love that idea, but we all know it was only a matter of time. I'm fascinated to see how that rolls out.
Brent (16:11.105)
the yeah, add the ads the ad thing I think is well, I suppose it's theoretically gonna reduce the cost of what what it is for to run an LLM. how about the how about this idea that well let's just pretend I have a Shopify site and Shopify has has the the integration already built in as a Shopify site that you probably opted in for by default to Chat GPT.
Should me should myself as a merchant also be encoding all my pages with JSON LD and all the fun stuff that that you do on the front end as well as as what's already built in now on the back end in Shopify?
Danny Kirk (16:53.238)
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not an expert on that. From what I've heard, that's important, but yeah, I'm probably not the right person to technically speak to that. It does sound like it's important from some of the experts I follow though.
Brent (17:04.905)
I've seen I've been pitched that you need to have a completely marked down version of your website like llm.domain.com. Do you see any value in doing something like that?
Danny Kirk (17:19.018)
I would say if if the cost is low, maybe. you know, a lot of these things, like I was a few months ago, I I we got a new website, Claude built it, and then I had Claude optimize it f so it could read it. You know, I was like, all right, make sure this is optimized, and it did need some particular things. I spent twenty dollars on that. So yeah, I felt pretty good about that. If it costs a lot more, many times that, I probably wouldn't feel so good about that.
Brent (17:44.866)
Yeah, I I thought one thing really interesting is you know the LLM.txt file that you're supposed to have, like your robots file.
I wrote I wrote an article about that, then I had a bunch of people telling me that like this is just completely useless right now because nobody's act nobody's adopted it. And I didn't think about well, everybody's talking about it, but nobody's adopted it, right? So w I the only thing I'm trying to say is like we're at such an early entry point, but everything is moving so fast. And like you said, if it doesn't cost a lot of money to make your LLM.txt your L L at
Danny Kirk (18:06.381)
Yeah.
Brent (18:19.227)
llm dot domain site and might as well do an llm.txt right it's if if they're if it's somebody's gonna use it let it let it use it
Danny Kirk (18:29.676)
Yeah, and you know, I think all of us were kicking ourselves for not getting into SEO thirty years ago. I mean, I'm not that old, so I I shouldn't say that. But this feels like a very similar thing today. It's like the the traffic from AI probably to your website is probably single digits right now. But yet again, this is a snowball you wanna be building. So you're not kicking yourself ten years from now wishing you had started building that snowball now. It's tiny right now, it might not matter, but you should start working.
Brent (18:58.665)
Yeah, from a traffic standpoint, I've seen numbers as low as it's as low as ten percent coming from LLMs is to as high as twenty percent, which still means that Google owns a huge percentage of that traffic. Doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about it, right? But it there is now is the time you should be doing it. Now is the time you should plant your tree, not in twenty years.
Danny Kirk (19:19.234)
Yeah, I totally agree. I also think about the generation that's younger than me, because it's all about buying trends with different generations. Like I grew up with Google. I am also using AI as a consumer as well. But imagine this generation that's younger than me that will never know tin blue links and they will only ever have their AI chat bot that they've been chatting with for decades. N now imagine that buying shift. So yeah, you want to start building that snowball today.
Brent (19:42.347)
Right.
Brent (19:48.486)
I'm you know what one thing that I've experienced is I'm a big claude code user, so a lot of times I'll it'll tell me something, I'm like, God, I just I don't think I don't think that's right. So then I'll go to Google and I'll Google it. And now Google gives me a whole explanation of how to do it. I copy and paste Google and put it into Claude Code, and then it's like, yeah, you're right. That is I I was mista you're right. That was you should have done it that way in the first place.
Mm. The only thing is like the only question I is like you can't really trust any of them. You you have to be like you have to be questioning what they're giving you. Because like you said, they're filtering out all that garbage data on Reddit. They're giving you the good things, but maybe some of that garbage data is data you need to know. Like that criticism of that running shoe is something that maybe you should know. And the person who said it is saying it in a way that is so inflammatory and direct.
Like that you're not gonna wanna r they they they filtered it out.
Danny Kirk (20:46.766)
Absolutely, that's definitely true. And AI, of course, just like the humans it was trained on, has its own incentives. Just today, I'm helping grow another company right now, and we have an an app that we're building. Well, it's actually live, but I was working on some features in it, a live chat as well as automated emails. U somebody an expert in the field, a full stack developer, was like, hey, get these out-of-the-box solutions, grab the API and plug that into Lovable.
So I was like, lovable, what do you think about these two out-of-the-box solutions? And it was like, no, no, no. You let's just build something custom. And you know why it said that? It's because it's selling me tokens, you know. So of course it's gonna say let's build something custom, even though that is the absolute wrong thing to do.
Brent (21:20.331)
Huh.
Brent (21:26.506)
Yeah, yeah.
Brent (21:32.991)
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean I think that the whole idea of the slide into doing everything the way you want that LLMs are gonna do it, if you don't understand like a Git repository, then you could potentially make yourself a really great working website that's dead because the LLM rewrote it the next day.
Danny Kirk (21:52.791)
Yeah. I've seen a few of those horror stories now. I'm in a group of a thousand e-commerce owners and yeah, there's been a few where they're like, Boy, I woke up Sunday morning and our website was gone, you know, and a website generating, you know, half a million a day and they're like it it just disappeared and we had to rebuild the thing from a just nightmarish. But of course that's that's an edge case, but it does happen.
Brent (22:15.239)
Yeah. I write a newsletter called Tuesdays with Claude. So I have a lot there's a lot of emotions in that. And the thing is that, you know, I guess LMs don't care about what your emotions is. And the other thing is that when you're asking it for information, it's not necessarily telling you anything ahead of time what's gonna happen. It's told you what's happened, right? So I think that's another indication. But anyway, so sorry, Randy, Danny, sorry, we we've gotten a little off track.
What what is your take for this next quarter? What what are you excited about in Reddit? What are you excited about for your business?
Danny Kirk (22:50.316)
Yeah, absolutely. Excited about and Reddit. they most they recently cracked down on a lot of automations. That's making it easier than ever for good actors like myself that are a hundred percent human to do better than ever for the clients we get to serve. and for business, yeah, we're actually in partnership with another agency to kind of partner on bigger projects with full AI search optimization because anybody that wants
Reddit marketing, they really want to be come up in AI search and anybody that wants AI search optimization needs Reddit marketing. So pretty excited about that too.
Brent (23:27.211)
That's perfect. Danny, as we have a few minutes left here as we close things up. I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?
Danny Kirk (23:36.288)
Yeah, I'm gonna shamelessly plug precision fuel. So I used these on a long run recently. Had the woman who won Cocodona a couple weeks ago. I saw her slurping these things down. The precision fuel ninety G carb gels, I'm all about them. Very little stomach issues. So you're welcome, Precision Fuel.
Brent (23:57.525)
That's awesome. I'm a big I was a big tailwind user too, and they were based in Colorado. They came from Colorado. That was I used them for the such a long time, but it was so hard. I I stopped wearing a a camelback when I started doing more faster road marathons, and it I couldn't carry it, but I still had some stomach issues. So that's a good, that's a good tip. Thanks, Danny. All right, Danny Kirk is the founder of ReddiSearch Thank you so much for being here today.
Danny Kirk (24:17.794)
Yeah, totally.
Danny Kirk (24:24.303)
All right. Thanks, Brent.