There’s a narrative going around that Reddit is the key to AI search visibility. That if your clients aren’t active on Reddit, they’re invisible to large language models. That the future of SEO is forum-based, community-generated content.
Andy Crestodina went on stage at Vistara 2026 in Austin and showed live data that tells a different story.
When you run AI queries for specific industries: the kinds of searches your actual B2B clients care about, Reddit doesn’t appear in the citations. What does appear? Industry trade publications. Company websites. Authoritative, indexed, original content that follows the basic principles SEO professionals have understood for years.
Robbie Adair and I were at Vistara as a sponsor (Kinsta) and media partner, and this was one of the clearest, most actionable moments of the conference. Not because it was surprising, but because it was validating.
Agencies have spent the past two years fielding a question that sounds like this: “Do we still need a website, or is [social media / AI / voice search / Reddit] replacing it?” The honest answer has always been yes, you still need a website. Now there’s data from someone like Andy, who has been running annual website research studies with over 1,000 respondents for years, to back it up.
Here’s what AI citation hunting actually looks like in practice. You take your competitor’s website (or your client’s best competitor) and ask an AI tool what it knows about them. Then you dig into where those citations are coming from. That’s the new backlink audit. And just like the original backlink audit, what you find is that the best citations come from the same places they always have: respected publications in your industry, your own well-structured website, original research, and clear expertise.
The unsexy truth is that the agencies who’ve been doing this stuff right for years: building great client websites, earning trade pub placements, publishing original content, have been building for AI compatibility without knowing it.
What this means for your agency right now:
Audit where your clients’ AI citations are coming from. Identify the trade publications in their industry that AI is citing most often. Make getting a client mention in those publications a service line. And keep building websites. Good ones. Fast ones. Ones with clear structure and original thought.
The AI citation game is SEO. Your clients’ websites are still the most important thing you help them own.