Anyone who runs sales or support out of a HubSpot shared inbox knows the routine: junk pitches and automated messages pile up next to real customer requests, and someone on the team has to sort through all of it by hand.
When those teams go looking for a fix, they usually start with a plain Google search. This case is about making sure that, among the first results, they found a Reddit discussion pointing them to the right tool.
Client
A SaaS app sold through the HubSpot Marketplace, built around a problem every busy shared inbox runs into sooner or later: spam that eats the team’s time and clutters the CRM. The app uses AI to score incoming messages and flag the junk before anyone has to open it.
Goal
Get Reddit discussions that recommend the app to rank on US Google for the query HubSpot users type when they want an AI-powered way to filter their email: “AI email filter hubspot”.
Task
Step into conversations that already existed, start new ones on the topic, and make the threads active enough for Google to treat them as a relevant answer — all within a one-month campaign.
Strategy
The campaign combined three moves, each covering a different part of how a Reddit thread earns its place in search.
Phase 1 — Joining existing conversations. The team found relevant Reddit threads that were already live and left two comments mentioning the app. That put the brand inside discussions that didn’t have to be built from scratch, and gave it a presence on Reddit beyond the threads the campaign created itself.
Phase 2 — Launching topical posts. Alongside that, the team published two original posts on the topic, each mentioning the app. Under every post, the team added one more comment with a brand mention, so the recommendation showed up both in the post and in the conversation below it.
Phase 3 — Growing the discussion. Each of those mention comments received 11 replies with no brand mention at all — boosts, in Reddit-promotion terms. Their job is to grow the comment branch, so the thread reads as a genuine back-and-forth rather than a single plug, both to Google and to the people who land on it.
Results
Ranking. Within a month, the thread in r/EmailForSmallBusiness reached second place in US Google’s organic results for “AI email filter hubspot”. The only result above it is an article from HubSpot’s own knowledge base.
Visibility in the snippet. Google displays more than 10 comments under the thread right in the search results, so the discussion looks active before anyone even clicks.
Result: #2 on US Google for the target query in one month, on a $540 budget.
Why It Worked
A query like “AI email filter hubspot” comes from someone who already uses a specific platform and needs one concrete problem solved inside it. That person is not browsing; they want to know what actually works for teams like theirs.
Google increasingly answers this kind of search with Reddit, because a thread where real users compare notes speaks to the question behind the query — has anyone tried this? — in a way a product page can’t. For an app that lives inside another company’s ecosystem, that matters twice over: its own site has to compete for attention with the platform’s documentation, while a Reddit thread enters the results as a different kind of answer altogether.
The campaign’s structure worked with that logic. Comments in existing threads took the brand beyond the campaign’s own posts; the topical posts gave Google a page built around the subject; and the boosts turned each recommendation into a conversation, which is exactly what a searcher expects to find when a Reddit result appears.
Conclusion
For apps and integrations built on top of popular platforms, search has a built-in obstacle: the results page is shared with the platform itself, and the platform’s own pages tend to take the top spots.
Reddit offers a way onto that page through the kind of user conversations Google already likes to show. Here, one month of focused work put a discussion about the app directly under HubSpot’s own documentation — right where its future users were already looking. For teams selling into an established ecosystem, that may be the most direct route to being found by the people who need them.
Hi! I'm Viktoriia 👋
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