Jonny Waite is the Co-founder and CEO of RECHO, a full-service Reddit marketing agency helping brands grow through organic community management, paid advertising, and Reddit-native strategy. With 17 years of agency-side digital experience, Jonny built SEO, paid search, Amazon, and omnichannel programs for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. He helps brands navigate Reddit authentically, manage reputation, and improve visibility across search and AI-driven discovery.<br>In this episode…<br>Reddit has become a critical place where consumers discover, debate, and validate brands. As AI tools increasingly pull from Reddit conversations, brands can no longer afford to ignore what is being said there. What does it take to show up the right way before competitors, customers, and AI models define the narrative?<br>According to Jonny Waite, a Reddit and SEO expert, the answer starts with listening before engaging. Brands should first understand where they are being mentioned, how competitors are showing up, and which subreddits matter most before jumping into the conversation. Jonny explains that Reddit rewards authentic, consistent participation, not brand-driven responses that only appear when reputation is at risk. For brands thinking about AI visibility, Reddit is becoming a long-term authority channel where early, thoughtful engagement can shape discoverability and trust.<br>In this episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant chats with Jonny Waite, Co-founder and CEO of RECHO, about why Reddit has become essential for brand visibility. Jonny shares how LLMs are accelerating Reddit&#x27;s influence, why brands should assess sentiment before acting, and how paid and organic Reddit strategies differ. He also touches on budget ownership, PR, SEO, and future-proofing AI visibility.

The Rising Importance of Reddit With Jonny Waite

The Digital Deep Dive With Aaron Conant

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Digital Deep Dive With Aaron Conant

## Participants

- **Aaron Conant** (The Digital Deep Dive)
- **Jonny Waite** (RECO)

## Transcript

You're listening to The Digital Deep Dive, where we tackle the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth across the digital landscape. From Amazon and D2C to international expansion, join our host and e-commerce leaders across multiple industries for in-depth discussions on how to maximize your brands in the digital arena. Now, here's your host, Aaron Conant. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Digital Deep Dive podcast. I'm your host, Aaron Conant.

And today, we're going to dive into Reddit. Reddit has really popped up, I would say, maybe 10% to 20% of my conversations over the past few months here and just have a lot of interest in it as a whole. I think a lot of it's driven by the LLMs. But to help fill us in on that, Jonny Waite's here from RECO. They're an amazing Reddit agency, which is kind of interesting that we have Reddit agencies popping up now. But that's what we're going to dive into today.

Jonny, I'll kick it over to you. You want to do a brief intro yourself, background? And even Recco, like what you guys are doing? Reddit. Hi, everybody. I'm Jonny Waite. I've been in digital about 17 years, pretty much all agency side. I've been at private and holding co-agencies by specialization. Obviously, a Reddit expert, but also an SEO expert.

Built and run SEO programs, paid search, Amazon, Omnichannel from Fortune 100 down to well-funded startups in pretty much every vertical imaginable a few times over. I co-founded Recco. And Recco is quite literally, I think, one of three maybe full-service white hat SEO agencies in the U.S. Full service being we run both paid and organic.

White hat being we do everything through Reddit's compliance. So everything is done the right way, not introducing more brain risk. We work with primarily mid-market to enterprise. And about two-thirds of our clients are D2C, B2B. And we've been growing like wildfire. As Aaron said, Reddit is very popular right now. But, yeah, we have a great team of specialists.

We use some agentic models to help us scale and do things through commercial ones. But I think we have a pretty amazing service and excited to get into Reddit today. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for jumping on because I've got a bunch of questions. And, I mean, I think you probably confirmed it. It's the LLMs, how I kind of understand where they're going to look for information. A lot of people are saying, like, it's the retailer.com first and maybe brand.com second.

And then after that is everything else. But at the top of the everything else, right, is Reddit. And it was interesting. I was just talking to a brand the other day. And they're just now jumping into it. And what they're discovering is their brand is already being talked about all over the place. It actually reminds me of, like, Amazon way bac...

The Rising Importance of Reddit With Jonny Waite

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

The Rising Importance of Reddit With Jonny Waite

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.