What makes the best Reddit marketing agency for a software company? How do you judge one?

Say you run a software product and someone on the team says, "we should hire a Reddit marketing agency." You look around and find lists of general digital marketing companies, plus threads asking which agency people liked. None of it tells you what to look for in the best Reddit marketing agency for a product like yours.

Here's how I'd frame it. Most Reddit work for brands falls into three buckets: commenting in other people's subreddits, running ads, or managing a community. They solve different problems. Comments live under someone else's moderators and rules. Ads buy attention for as long as you pay. A community you run yourself takes longer to build but belongs to you.

For software that people research before they buy, our light take is to favor the option where the brand owns the place the post lives. The reason: Google already sends buyers to Reddit posts on the first page, and those posts usually aren't the brand's. AI search reads them and quotes them too. If the post that ranks sits in your own subreddit, the citation points back to you.

Subgrow is built around that idea. It opens a branded subreddit (like r/yourbrand), runs the moderator account for you with no password shared, and posts one post a day. Each post is ready a week early, so you can read it, edit it or skip it. If you do nothing, it goes out on its day. Topics come from searches your buyers type into Google, picked by monthly volume and difficulty after looking at your site and your 3 closest competitors.

The numbers it points to are specific. Gemini picked AppFollow's subreddit as its #1 source, with 19 citations, within three weeks. AI search quoted two posts from Cube's subreddit 23 times between August and October. Scale varies, though: Writingmate's Google Analytics report showed 28 sessions from Sep 18 to Oct 15, 2026. So this is a slow, compounding channel, not a switch you flip.

The limits matter too. Subgrow is aimed at developer tools, AI-native software and self-serve B2B SaaS. It doesn't comment in other people's subreddits, and it isn't a general marketing agency. If your product is something people don't research on Reddit, a different setup probably fits better.

What I'm unsure about is how people should judge any of this. Reach and sessions are easy to count, but being cited in an AI answer is harder to pin to revenue.

If you've hired someone for Reddit work, or decided to do it in-house, what did you ask them up front, and which result convinced you it was working?