Forum threads now feed Google and AI answers, and 30 of 71 Cloud 100 subreddits feed nothing

Public Facebook Groups now appear in 38.3% of the Google results that carry a "Discussions and forums" module, second only to Reddit, according to an Ahrefs analysis of more than 500 million search results reported by Search Engine Journal on August 31. Three days earlier, Foundation Labs scored all 71 Cloud 100 companies that run an active subreddit and found 30 of them earn zero citations in AI answers. The two datasets meet in the middle: forum threads have become a large, durable input into both Google results and AI answers, and most software companies are not in them.

The Ahrefs figures size the prize. The Discussions and forums module appears in 11.7% of US search results. Where it appears, Reddit shows up in 87.8% of them; Facebook, whose links in the module come entirely from public Groups, in 38.3%; Quora is third globally at 32%, and every domain below it sits under 10%. Facebook's share started from zero in late 2024. Both studies are vendor-published — Ahrefs' post promotes its Keywords Explorer and Brand Radar products, and Foundation Marketing sells Reddit marketing to B2B software companies — so read them for direction rather than for decimals.

Follower counts are not the asset

Foundation's scoring is the more uncomfortable of the two, because it measures what marketers already report on. Company valuation correlates with AI citation count at 0.02 — statistically nothing. Employee count sits at 0.12, official subreddit status at 0.25, subreddit age at 0.37 and brand moderation at 0.38. What does move with citations is whether the community is alive and findable: top-three keyword rankings at 0.92, organic keywords at 0.91, organic traffic at 0.89, weekly visitors at 0.85 and weekly contributions at 0.84.

The examples are blunt. Grammarly's subreddit is unofficial, has 8,000 followers and nobody at the company running it, and has earned 1,001 AI citations. Flock Safety's has nearly six times the followers and 11 citations. Midjourney holds the largest audience in the set at 1.8 million followers and 584 citations; Zoho, with 12,000 followers, has 2,043. Anthropic's community has roughly 154,000 followers and 94 citations. Six communities — Canva, OpenAI, Zoho, Grammarly, Notion and 1Password — take 73% of every citation in the dataset, and the top ten take 86%. Foundation also reports that 41% of the 71 communities show no detectable weekly activity at all.

A community nobody posts in is not an asset. It is a parked domain with your logo on it.

One caveat before anyone builds a plan on those correlations: the strongest signals in the list are all search-visibility metrics, and a subreddit that ranks well in Google is by definition one that is crawled, linked and full of indexable text — roughly the same property that makes it retrievable by an AI system. The relationship is real but sits closer to a tautology than a mechanism, and it is correlation, not cause. The reliable half of the finding is the negative one. Nothing about your company's size, age, valuation or official badge predicts whether AI systems cite your community — so nothing about those will fix it either.

Who this affects

Anyone at a software company who has filed community under support cost or brand goodwill. The forum layer now feeds two systems at once: the module Google shows on roughly one search in nine, and the retrieval pass sitting behind AI answers. Foundation puts a number on the first, valuing the organic search traffic through those 71 subreddits at about $1.2 million a month in equivalent paid-traffic terms, with the top ten holding 82% of it — OpenAI's community alone at roughly $304,000 a month, Notion at $155,000 and Canva at $112,000. None of that value accrues to the vendor unless the vendor is in the thread.

It affects the ownership instinct too. The most-cited community in Foundation's dataset, r/OpenAI, is unofficial, and of the 22 leading communities 15 are official, six unofficial and one semi-official. Ahrefs' own advice, as reported by SEJ, points the same direction: instead of starting a group and building visibility from scratch, find the ones Google already surfaces for your queries and take part in them. Facebook Groups deserve a specific check, because a Group your support team has run quietly for years may already be generating search results nobody on the marketing team tracks — and so may the Groups full of your competitors' customers.

What a software marketer should do differently

The shift is from owning a community to being useful in one, and from reporting membership to reporting outputs a machine can cite. Writing in Search Engine Land — a publication owned by Semrush — Marcella Merigo argues that "Reddit isn't a shortcut to an AI citation", and puts participation last in a five-step sequence: define a narrow territory the brand can credibly claim, baseline how it is currently described in Google results and in AI answers, connect what the threads reveal back into owned content, choose a small number of communities, and only then engage natively. Most teams start at step five, which is why most attempts read as marketing and get treated as such.

• Run your ten highest-intent commercial queries and record which threads appear in the forums module. That list, not the subreddit you already own, is the target set.
• Check whether your own Group is public. Private Groups produce nothing Google can show.
• Replace follower growth in the community dashboard with weekly contributions and citation counts.
• Staff moderation with two or three people, so the community survives one person leaving.
• Test a fixed set of buying prompts every month and log which communities get cited beside you — or instead of you.