Is Your SaaS Invisible to AI?

Search is dead. At least the way we knew it.

Consumers aren’t typing keywords into Google anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google’s shiny new AI Overviews a direct question, and trusting the single answer they get back.

That shift is brutal. Either your SaaS shows up in that AI-generated response, or as far as the customer is concerned, you don’t exist. According to Uberall’s 2025 report, 30 percent of consumers already prefer AI answers over browsing a website, and another 35 percent are undecided. The new funnel isn’t ten blue links. It’s one box.

And here’s the kicker: in 2024, Google cut a $60 million per year deal with Reddit to pump real-time community content straight into its AI models. That means Google AI Overviews are trained on Reddit threads, hot takes, bug reports, and casual comments. Meanwhile, Reddit gets to use Google’s AI tools like Vertex AI to power its own search and discovery.

So what does that mean for you? It means Reddit has gone from the internet’s messy back alley to the front page of search. Where polished brand blogs used to dominate, random threads are now surfacing first in AI answers. For niche or long-tail queries, community chatter is beating entire marketing teams.

If you are a SaaS founder, this should terrify you. Google’s models are treating Reddit posts and forum chatter as primary data. If your product isn’t showing up in those conversations, you’re invisible. Full stop.

And the definition of authority has been rewritten. It’s no longer just backlinks and domain ratings. Authority now means: are people talking about you in public, are you fresh, and do you feel real? A polished SEO blog might still land you on page one of Google, but that won’t matter if AI ignores you. Fewer clicks. Fewer impressions. Less trust.

The Bigger Picture: AI Discoverability

This isn’t just my take. HubSpot recently published a comprehensive report, Mastering AI Discoverability, that digs into how businesses can win in this new environment. A few highlights stand out:

• AI doesn’t play by old SEO rules. Traditional link-building and keyword stuffing don’t guarantee visibility in AI-generated answers.
• Structured data matters. Clean schema markup and well-organized content make it easier for AI systems to recognize and cite your brand.
• Citations beat rankings. What counts is whether your product is mentioned and trusted across multiple surfaces, reviews, forums, social, blogs.
• Freshness is non-negotiable. AI models lean heavily on up-to-date content. If your articles or docs haven’t been refreshed, you’re less likely to surface.
• Trust = multi-source validation. AI is more likely to cite you when your brand shows up consistently across different credible places, not just your own site.

HubSpot’s report echoes what the Google–Reddit deal made painfully clear: discoverability in the AI era isn’t about optimizing for search engines, it’s about optimizing for answer engines.

What SaaS Founders Should Do

So what do you do? Stop hiding behind perfect copy. Get loud where the conversations are happening. Monitor Reddit, Hacker News, and forums where your buyers hang out. Pay attention to the raw pain points people are venting about. Then answer those problems directly in your content.

Push your happy users to leave public reviews or share their workflows. Make sure your website isn’t just human-readable but machine-readable: schema, structure, freshness. And take a page from the HubSpot playbook, treat AI discoverability as its own growth channel, not a side effect of SEO.

The Bottom Line

The Google–Reddit deal isn’t just a licensing agreement. It’s a giant neon sign that says community content now drives visibility. And reports like HubSpot’s Mastering AI Discoverability only reinforce the same truth: if you’re not part of those conversations, you’re invisible to the algorithms deciding your fate.

But if you lean in, you’ll get cited, trusted, and surfaced in ways SEO alone will never buy you.

The choice is simple: either your SaaS becomes part of the AI answer, or you disappear.

‍

‍