Why Reddit is PR’s most useful creative tool

Now that I’m in my 'in-between' era, my energies are pointed at a personal project that’s required months of insight gathering, and this has meant getting deep into Reddit, says Kat Thomas, formerly founder and chief communications officer, One Green Bean.

As a quick explainer for those who need it: Reddit is built around communities called subreddits. Each subreddit is a world of its own, moderated by users, fuelled by conversation rather than content strategy. Posts rise through upvotes and sink through downvotes. You scroll, you click, you read, you eventually wade in. It’s sometimes text-heavy, sometimes all memes, but it's a treasure trove of behaviours, opinions, trend indicators and dumb shit.

I got pretty deep into some niche verticals. Like r/crisps, because who doesn't love looking at an endless rotation of real and imaginary flavours. And r/supplements, because if you don’t have a vit-stack these days, are you even living? Plus a hundred others. It reiterated that Reddit is one of the most underused creative and reputational tools. For years, PR teams tended to treat Reddit as a narrow online environment; a place to check for crisis signals or to occasionally watch brands attempt AMAs (Ask Me Anythings). But Reddit has changed. And in a way that now places it right at the centre of creative PR thinking.

Reddit as a creative compass

According to Ofcom, Reddit reached 22.9 million UK adults in May 2024, which is almost half of UK online adults. That’s impressive, but what matters creatively is not the number; it's the honesty. 

Reddit is where people talk the way they talk in the real world, about stuff they want to talk about. 

No brand polish or key messages. Just real language about real products and experiences, meaning subreddits are a kind of ever-evolving cultural research lab.

Communities like r/AskUK behave like an unofficial barometer of the national mood. It shows what Brits care about and worry about, making it a brilliant place to dig out inspo for campaigns with a deep British nuance. There's r/BuyItForLife which shows what people value in products. For creative teams, this is full of really good, rich stuff. It can mean the difference between developing ideas that sit adjacent to culture and developing ideas that come from right within it. It's total cat-nip for corp-comms people too, desperate to dig into category blind spots and competitor advantages.

The shift into the LLM era

Alongside its ability to be a cultural radar, Reddit has also become structurally important to modern PR. Last year Reddit signed significant licensing deals with Google and OpenAI. These allow their AI models, Gemini and ChatGPT, to ingest Reddit conversations to train and inform the answers they generate. The value of these two deals was reported to be north of US £200 million.

This means that when someone asks ChatGPT a perception-forming question like “Is this brand any good?” or “Is this company trustworthy”, the answer is influenced by Reddit conversations, so it's directly contributing to the brand's reputation. This shift is massive. It means Reddit is no longer just where culture ticks over; it is where the AI machines now learn what “truth” looks like. And in an age where people increasingly expect quick summaries and clear answers, and they're trusting what AI serves them, that makes Reddit a foundational influence on modern brand reputation.

What this means heading into 2026

This combination of rich, authentic, constantly shifting cultural insight and AI visibility makes Reddit more important to PR professionals than ever before. It's still a risk alert channel, where early issues often brew, but it's also now a listening tool and a creative brief generator, because it's the place where cultural tension, frustrations, praise and niggles surface early. If a product is frustrating people, you will see it here. Want to know what's really winning in the Christmas sandwich or pumpkin-spiced latte wars? Or how the people really feel about this year's festive ads? You know where to look.

Where this leaves PR creatives

In a great place. Reddit gives us proximity to the audience we are trying to understand and unlock a reaction from. 

It gives us nuance, contradiction and deep cultural specificity. 

It gives us the raw material that, when blended with earned-first smarts, craft and originality, will give ideas a new dimension of being part of the trending conversation, not playing catch-up three months late.

Reddit has quietly moved from being a quirky corner of the internet known for loons and enthusiasts to something far more consequential. And I guarantee you’ll be talking about it a hell of a lot more in 2026.