The How AI Search Can Drive Sales & Boost Conversions webinar, presented recently by Bartosz Góralewicz, touched on something that I think every marketer needs to understand about how people actually make decisions today.
This isn’t just about Reddit anymore; we’re talking about the future of how brands actually connect with customers when they’re making real decisions.
Bartosz shared some data from Cloudflare that’s wild: 10 years ago, Google crawled two pages for every one click. Six months ago? Six pages per click. Today, it’s 18 pages for every single click! OpenAI is crawling 1,500 pages for each click they send. And get this, in 2024, 60% of Google searches ended in zero clicks, as LLMs increasingly serve answers directly on the page, according to Justin Turner, Head of Thought Leadership at Reddit.
As Bartosz put it, quoting Cloudflare’s CEO: “People trust AI more and they’re just not following the footnotes anymore.”
But here’s what everyone’s missing: Reddit is just the messenger.
What Reddit Really Shows Us
Reddit appears in nearly 98% of product review searches because it’s solving a problem that traditional marketing content can’t touch. When someone searches “iPhone 16 vs Samsung S25,” they’ll find millions of YouTube views but almost no traditional search volume data.
The conversation is happening, just not where we’ve been looking. Turner’s research shows Reddit is the No. 1 most cited domain across all major AI platforms, accounting for 3.5% of all citations across AI models, nearly three times more than Wikipedia.
What Reddit provides, and what Google and OpenAI are paying for, is authentic peer advice instead of corporate marketing messages. Users want to feel understood, not sold to. They want contextual advice that feels like someone actually gets their specific problem.
As Bartosz explained it, when someone is researching a car, they don’t want to hear from paid bloggers. They want to talk to someone who actually drives the thing every day and can tell them the radio breaks 11 times in the first year. That’s the stuff you won’t find on the company website.
The Real Journey People Take
During our webinar, Bartosz walked through this perfect example from his own experience. He bought a wool carpet, discovered he couldn’t use his Dyson on it (voids the warranty), and now needed a suction-only vacuum.
Bartosz showed how this creates a progression that most marketers never see:
- Stage 1: “Why can’t I use Dyson on wool carpet?”
- Stage 2: “Suction only vacuums for wool carpets”
- Stage 3: “Miele C1 suction only vacuum safe”
Each answer informs the next question. As Bartosz explained, understanding this progression isn’t just about Reddit; it’s about understanding how people actually think and research!
The thing is, sometimes, this entire customer journey condenses into one perfect answer. Bartosz showed us how, when someone asked, “Why is it bad to use Dyson on wool carpet?” Perplexity immediately recommended Miele as the solution. One conversation, massive conversion potential.
But as Bartosz emphasized, you can’t manufacture this by guessing. You have to listen to actual conversations and understand the real problems people are trying to solve. This is exactly why he created ZipTie.ai, to help brands identify those critical moments in customer conversations where they can genuinely solve problems rather than just promote products.
And here’s proof that this approach actually works: Turner’s data shows users referred from ChatGPT view 42% more pages per session than those referred from Google, showing more intent, deeper curiosity, and stronger engagement.
Why This Changes Everything
I’ve been looking for this shift in marketing for years, waiting for it to come back to the actual science behind why people make decisions. The funnel is longer now, people are using more places along the way, and when you can find what people really need, honestly, content really is king again. But not content for content’s sake, problem-solving is all you really need.
Bartosz’s Miele example shows something that’s often overlooked. You wouldn’t see this in your regular website data or in traditional Google articles. It’s not visible to most brands because we’re so conditioned to look down this logical marketing path that we miss the conversations happening right in front of us.
We started seeing it more clearly when people began giving us signals by writing on Reddit. Why are they doing that? Because they want validation. When you give them that validation through genuine problem-solving, it works!
The New Success Metrics
Bartosz talked about how we need to stop chasing old metrics. Rankings, clicks, and keywords still matter, but they’re not the whole story anymore.
As he put it, here’s what actually matters now:
- Are you the recommended solution throughout the customer journey?
- Do you show contextual relevance that makes users feel understood?
- Can you track your influence through actual conversion paths?
As Bartosz said, “The teams that are going to win nowadays are going to be the teams that are going to solve the most amount, the biggest amount of problems that users have.”
The Authenticity Problem
To be authentic, you have to talk about positives and negatives. The biggest challenge I have in discovery calls with huge brands is that they tell me, “we cannot say we don’t do this or we don’t do this.”
But that’s exactly what you need to do!
I always tell people Reddit success comes down to three overlapping areas: what Redditors expect from you, what you honestly have to give, and where your business goals align. That overlap is your area of influence.
A TikTok campaign I did years ago started with 300 messages telling me to basically get lost (wasn’t as kind though). But once people realized we were real humans having real conversations, everything changed. People started editing their posts, sending improvement ideas, giving us awards.
That’s the power of authentic engagement.
The Psychology Behind It All
People want to share every decision they make with somebody because it’s our nature to want to share responsibility. It’s a way of validating that we’re not total idiots; we at least explored the conversation. “I talked to my friend John and he said it was a good phone.”
But there’s more to it than just sharing responsibility. We’re also looking for validation that someone has actually experienced the issue, product, or service we’re researching and has real information to share about it.1 We want to hear from people who’ve been there, not from someone reading a spec sheet or writing content that’s been paid for, influenced, or even completely faked. There’s so little trust in traditional search results anymore because we know so much of what we find is compromised.
Also, we rarely have the right problem when we start searching. We think we need “the best vacuum” when what we really need is “a vacuum that won’t destroy my wool carpet.” It takes conversation and depth to uncover what the real problem actually is. That’s why those Reddit threads go so deep: People are working through layers of issues together.
Most importantly, we want to feel like we learned enough to come to our own decision. We don’t want someone to tell us what to buy; we want to feel smart about figuring it out ourselves with good information from people we trust.2
I’ve been talking about these concepts a lot lately, but this isn’t just my personal theory. This behavior is extensively researched across psychology, behavioral economics, and decision science. Studies consistently show that people actively seek to share decision responsibility to reduce regret and minimize the psychological burden of negative outcomes. Research demonstrates that individuals are more likely to join groups or seek validation after experiencing negative results, and that sharing responsibility helps shield people from the emotional consequences of bad decisions.
What This Means Going Forward
This approach works because it aligns with human psychology. When you understand that core element, solving users’ real problems, everything gets better. Your commercials, website copy, social media ads, customer service. Everything improves when you know what people actually need to feel comfortable making a decision.
Reddit just happens to be where these conversations are most visible right now. But the principles apply everywhere: Understand the real problems, join authentic conversations, and focus on solving issues rather than promoting solutions.
The brands that figure this out first will own the next phase of digital marketing. The ones that keep chasing traditional metrics will keep wondering why their traffic is declining while their competitors seem to effortlessly show up everywhere that matters.
Definitely, definitely take the time to understand your user’s journey. Don’t be lazy about it. Really understand what people need at each stage, what problems they’re actually trying to solve, and where they go to get that validation they need to make decisions.
It’s not complicated, but it requires you to slow down and actually listen to your customers instead of talking at them.
Sources:
- https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/51/1/7/7672991?login=false
- https://acr-journal.com/article/consumer-trust-in-digital-brands-the-role-of-transparency-and-ethical-marketing-882/
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/convergence-product-marketing-seo-ai-search-era-ziptieai-aotnc/
More Resources:
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