By IBROYS · 2026-09-12

Reddit outranks agency websites for two-thirds of the buying keywords we tracked

We set up rank tracking for a new website. Not to celebrate the rankings — there weren't any — but to see who owns the first page for the searches that matter to us.

We tracked 15 keywords across four search engines. Twelve of them were commercial: the kind of thing somebody types when they're looking to hire, not to learn.

Reddit appeared in the top ten for 8 of those 12.

Where Reddit showed up

The two it missed are both local-service searches, where directories and local agencies hold the page instead.

For everything else — every keyword where somebody is comparing tools or looking for a supplier — a forum thread sits alongside, and often above, companies that have spent years on their websites.

Who else owns those pages

The second pattern is just as useful. Look at what fills the rest of the first page for "ai automation agency":

9 Best AI Automation Agencies (Ranked) — codeless.co · Top AI Automation Companies — DesignRush · 17 Top AI Automation Agencies — latenode.com · Top 10 AI Automation Agency Rankings — esparkinfo

Listicles. Not agencies — articles about agencies.

Same for "custom software development": Reddit, then Intellias, Devox, Chetu — and directory-style roundups above most of them.

What this means if you're a small company

We are a new company with a new site and no backlinks. The instinct is to write a services page targeting "ai automation agency" and wait. That page will not reach the first ten results in any reasonable timeframe, because the first ten are already held by pages with years of authority — and by Reddit, which has more domain authority than we will ever have.

Two things actually work from here, and neither is "write more service pages":

1. Be in the listicles. These pages accept submissions and updates. A single inclusion in a page that already ranks puts you on the first page for a term with real demand. That is a far shorter path than outranking it.

2. Be genuinely useful in the threads. Not spam — the threads that rank are ranking because they contain real answers from people who know the subject. If you know why WhatsApp cloud API is different from the unofficial libraries, and someone is asking exactly that, answering properly is both the honest thing and the visible thing.

The corollary, which we're taking seriously ourselves: if forum answers outrank service pages, then the thing worth publishing is what a forum answer contains — specifics, numbers, an actual opinion, and the caveats. Not brochure copy.

What we're not claiming

We tracked 15 keywords, on one day, through four engines. That is a snapshot, not a law of nature. Results differ by country, by personalisation, and by engine — and Google, which we could not query directly, may weight Reddit differently again.

We also can't tell you why Reddit ranks. There has been plenty of speculation about content deals and a general shift toward forum results; we didn't measure any of that. We measured where the results actually landed.

How we measured this

• Tool: a self-hosted SearXNG instance — open-source

metasearch — queried through its JSON API. No paid rank tracker, no API keys.

• Engines aggregated: DuckDuckGo, Brave, Mojeek, Startpage. Google was not included; it blocks

automated querying, and we didn't want to pretend otherwise.

• Method: one query per keyword, first page of aggregated results, deduplicated by domain. A

keyword counted as "Reddit in top 10" if any reddit.com URL appeared in the first ten distinct domains.

• Date: 12 September 2026. Fifteen keywords total; the twelve above are the commercial subset.
• Reproducible: the script is about 80 lines of Python and runs on any machine with Docker.

Happy to share it if it's useful to you.

IBROYS is a studio in Kerala. We build automation for document-heavy operations, and we publish what we measure — including the numbers that argue against doing what we sell.

Published 12 September 2026.

← All posts