- Speechly went from a flat baseline to 148K Google impressions and 4.93K clicks in 8 months, at 3.3% CTR
- The biggest query became the brand itself: speechly alone pulled 3,448 clicks, misspellings included
- Roughly 70% of the revenue came from the internal Reddit SaaS built for this playbook, the tool that became Readyt
- The same threads now feed AI answers, where Perplexity cites Reddit in 44.7% of sourced shopping responses
Speechly went from a flat search baseline to 148K Google impressions and 4.93K organic clicks in 8 months, with a 3.3% CTR and an average position of 8.7. The engine was not ads, and it was not a content team. It was Reddit threads, chosen deliberately, answered natively, and left to compound.
Full transparency before anything else: Speechly is our own product. It is a macOS speech-to-text app built by the team behind Readyt, and the internal tool we created to run this exact playbook is what later became Readyt itself. That is exactly why this case study is worth your time: we have the real Search Console data, we can show all of it, and we know which parts transfer to other products.
Here is the full story: the context, the strategy, the numbers, what they changed inside the company, and four lessons you can apply to your own product.
The setup: a good app stuck in an invisible niche
Speechly is a fast, accurate dictation app for macOS, sitting in a brutally competitive niche. When someone asked Google for the best speech-to-text app on Mac, the results were owned by a handful of Reddit threads and comparison posts. None of them mentioned Speechly.
Classic SEO looked like a dead end. The head keywords belonged to incumbents with years of domain authority, and a tiny team was never going to outspend them on content or ads. But the SERPs held a more interesting signal: the pages winning those searches were not brand sites. They were Reddit discussions.
That reframed the problem. We did not need to outrank Reddit. We needed to be inside the threads that were already outranking everyone else.
The playbook: answer the threads Google already ranks
The strategy had three moving parts, and none of them involved dropping promotional links.
- Find the threads that rank or will rank. Start from the queries buyers actually type, then map which Reddit threads hold or chase those positions. A thread on page one of Google is prime real estate with the rent unpaid.
- Write native replies with real substance. Honest comparisons, clear disclosure, and an actual answer to the question first. The product mention rides along; it never leads.
- Post from credible, warmed accounts. Account age, karma, and history decide whether a reply survives moderation. New accounts pitching software get removed before anyone reads them.
One approved reply pays three times. Thread readers see it today. Google searchers find it for months, because the thread keeps ranking. And AI models keep citing the thread long after. The mechanics of that first jump are exactly what we detail in how to rank a Reddit post on Google.
Cadence beat volume. A few quality replies per week, every week, each one approved by a human before posting. Most teams get this wrong: they sprint for two weeks, get banned or ignored, and conclude Reddit does not work.
The results: 148K impressions and a page one average
Over 8 months, Google Search Console for speechly.io recorded 148K impressions and 4.93K clicks, at a 3.3% average CTR and an average position of 8.7. Page one, on average, across every query the domain appeared for.
The shape of the curve matters as much as the totals. The graph is flat for the first months, then bends upward and keeps compounding. Reddit SEO has a built-in lag: threads take time to rank, replies take time to accumulate, and Google takes time to trust the pattern.
The raw screenshots, the Search Console performance graph, the top queries report, and the Ahrefs authority overview, are all published on the Speechly use case page. We would rather show the dashboards than describe them. Domain authority followed the same curve: ranked threads referencing the product built the kind of link and mention profile a small brand site could never earn through outreach.
The real win: branded search took over
The single biggest query in Search Console became the brand itself. "speechly" pulled 3,448 clicks, up from a handful at the start. The queries right behind it were misspellings: speachly, spechly, speecly. People discovered the app somewhere else, then went to Google to find it by name.
That somewhere else was Reddit threads, and increasingly the AI answers quoting them. This is the part referral dashboards undersell. Clicks from reddit.com are nice. Branded search demand is the real prize: it converts like high intent, and it belongs to you, not to an algorithm.
"We stopped shouting into ad auctions and started showing up in the threads people actually read. The branded searches followed on their own." Rafael Guilbert, co-founder of Speechly
What it changed: the side tool became the business
Running this playbook by hand does not scale, so we built internal tooling: thread discovery, reply drafting, account warmup, tracking. That internal Reddit SaaS quietly became the most valuable asset in the company. Roughly 70% of Speechly's revenue ended up coming from it, not from the dictation app it was built to promote.
That tool, rebuilt properly, became Readyt. Which is the second reason this case study exists: it is the origin story of the product, not a cherry-picked customer win. We are biased, and we are showing you the receipts anyway.
Four lessons you can steal
Strip away the specifics and four things transfer to almost any product.
- Rank threads, not just your site. Reddit's domain authority does work your domain cannot. A useful reply in a well-chosen thread can sit on page one for queries your blog would need years to touch. The broader system for software companies is covered in our guide to Reddit marketing for SaaS.
- Measure branded demand, not referral clicks. The metric that proved this worked was not traffic from reddit.com. It was the growth of the query "speechly" in Search Console, misspellings included. Watch your brand queries month over month.
- Substance survives, promotion dies. Every reply that lasted led with a real answer and disclosed the affiliation when it mattered. The removed ones, in our experience, are always the ones that lead with the pitch.
- Budget for the lag. The curve was flat for months before it bent. Plan in quarters, not sprints. If you want to skip the slowest part, finding the right threads, our free Reddit leads finder surfaces live threads where people are asking for a product like yours right now.
The GEO bridge: the same threads now feed AI answers
Everything above would justify the strategy in a Google-only world. But the same asset now has a second surface. Across LLM answers, 40.1% of citations point to Reddit, the most-cited domain in Semrush's analysis of 150,000+ citations (Semrush).
Our own data points the same way for buying intent. In our 1,000-search shopping study, Perplexity cited Reddit in 44.7% of sourced answers and made it the very first source in 23.5% of them. An engine running on a web index without Reddit access cited it 0 times in 500 answers.
For Speechly, that means the threads planted for Google rankings now double as source material for ChatGPT and Perplexity answers about Mac dictation apps. Same reply, third channel. The playbook did not change. The payoff surface grew.
FAQ
Is the Speechly case study based on real data?
Yes. Every number comes from Google Search Console for speechly.io: 148K impressions, 4.93K clicks, a 3.3% CTR, an average position of 8.7, and 3,448 clicks on the query "speechly". The unedited screenshots are on the use case page. And to be fully transparent: Speechly is our own product, built by the team behind Readyt.
How long did it take Speechly to see results from Reddit?
The full window is 8 months, and the first months looked flat. The inflection came once enough threads were ranking and reinforcing each other, and the curve compounded from there. Treat Reddit SEO like an investment with a lag: plan in quarters, and do not judge the channel on week three.
Did Speechly pay for Reddit ads or placements?
No. Every result came from organic replies in existing threads, written with real substance and posted from credible accounts, with a human approving each one. Ads can buy impressions inside Reddit, but they cannot buy a thread that ranks on Google or gets cited by AI engines. That compounding only comes from being in the conversation.
Does this playbook work outside of macOS apps?
Yes, wherever buyers research on Reddit before purchasing, which covers most SaaS and consumer categories. The mechanics are identical: find the threads your buyers read, add genuinely useful replies from credible accounts, and let Reddit's authority carry them onto Google and into AI answers. The niches change; the compounding loop does not.
Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.
