A year and a half ago, I wrote “The rise of forums: Why Google prefers them and how to adapt,” arguing that brands should build their own online forums and communities.
Let’s look at what’s happened since.
As of this writing, Reddit’s stock price has risen 177.6%. If you’d bought 100 shares of RDDT then, you’d be $13,113 richer today.
In a June 2025 analysis of 150,000 AI citations, Semrush found that Reddit was the top source, appearing in more than 40% of LLM responses.
So what happened? It comes down to the law of supply and demand.
The supply-and-demand crisis of online answers
The demand for answers has skyrocketed as people increasingly turn to LLMs.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok will try to come up with the answers from their training data, and failing that, they’ll search the web.
ChatGPT uses Bing, Gemini uses Google, and Claude, Grok, and Perplexity use their own internal search engine.
The web search engine will quickly find that the supply of long-tail answers is nonexistent.
And so it will surface the closest thing it can find: a Reddit thread that matches the keywords, but could very well have been written by a novice, an armchair expert, or a troll.Whose fault is it that the web is devoid of meaningful long-tail content?
Ultimately, it was Google’s.
Even the best SEO professionals among us were told by our clients and bosses that nothing mattered except for the One Ring – getting ranked on the top for a competitive head term.
We all started to write the same blog posts to try to grab that top spot, while the vast long tail went ignored.The irony is that if your brand has any kind of expertise or authority in your space, you always could – and still can – completely own the undiscovered country of the long-tail of search for your industry, a frontier of questions no brand has yet answered.
The advantages of user-generated content
The best way to do this – by far – is through user-generated content (UGC), which has several key characteristics:
It matches search intent: Users post the same way they search, using the same words.
It’s always up-to-date: New posts keep topics current without constant editorial work.
It’s accurate: Assuming your brand can attract experienced experts who contribute, each new reply will add value or correction.
It builds semantic depth: Conversations naturally surface related terms, subtopics, and entities that boost SEO and LLM discovery.
It’s trustworthy and AI-proof: Authentic human discussion is the one thing that LLMs can’t replicate.
If this all sounds familiar to you, it’s the same old E-E-A-T that Google has been trying to get us to do for years.
Only now, it really counts.
Why brands hesitate
Most companies instinctively resist the idea of launching a forum.
Here are the objections I hear most often – and how I respond.
It’s too expensive: Ironically, forum and Q&A software is among the most mature software in the open-source world. You can literally have a production-ready system up and running in a week at a cost less than a few cups of coffee. I’ll share some examples below.
We don’t have the development resources: If you’re not familiar with the concept of open-source, you don’t need development resources other than for tasks like skinning and building single sign-on, which your developers can do in their sleep.
We tried it before, and it didn’t work: In most cases, this is because forums were treated as side projects, and not owned media.
There’s no clear ROI: Forums have always reduced support tickets, but because it’s hard to prove a negative, most companies treated both online and offline customer service as cost centers – and the first things to cut. Today, forums still lower service costs and add valuable, search-friendly content. It’s time to redo the math.
Moderation is too much of a hassle: Today’s spam filters, coupled with smart heuristics, enforced policies, and AI-supported moderation, can handle 90% of bad actors. A strong community of users and in-house moderators can easily handle the rest.
Everyone’s already on Reddit or Discord: Exactly. And those platforms own your audience, your brand, and your data. It’s time to take it back.
Forums are outdated: Reddit is a forum. It has a market cap of $38 billion. Time to re-do the math on that one, too.
Discussion boards vs. Q&A sites
I tend to use the phrase “forums” interchangeably to refer to two kinds of sites: discussion boards and Q&A sites.There are key differences, depending on your company’s goals.A discussion board is built for ongoing conversation.
It’s a social space where customers can connect, share experiences, swap ideas, and engage in the occasional friendly debate, like an always-on company event or conference.
A Q&A site, by contrast, is built for resolution. Each post centers on a single question from a community member.
Some brands limit responses to verified experts, while others invite the whole community to contribute and vote on the best answer.
The goal is clarity: one question, one accepted solution.
Both formats create a treasure trove of owned, uniquely human content.
While other companies rely on generative AI to churn out soulless copy, with the help of your community, you’ll be building fresh content that feeds AI and, more importantly, reaches real customers.
As derivative AI-generated content floods the web, that authentic human signal will become a huge competitive edge.
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The open-source path to ownership
While many enterprise and SaaS options exist, most businesses can start with open-source software – ideal for small, mid-sized, or cost-conscious enterprises.
Here’s why open source makes sense.
Open source software is free
Every software package I recommend below will be free.
All you need is a web server or hosting plan (your own infrastructure, a cloud provider, or even a managed host), and you can run it yourself.
Open source software is customizable
Most mature open-source platforms enable brands to easily customize and extend functionality through plug-ins and extensions – all with a fraction of the development effort required to build a system from scratch.
Instead of building a huge system from scratch, your team can focus on customization, such as:
Customizing the front-end design to match your brand website.
Using single sign-on with your existing customer database to make access seamless for your customers.
Adding reputation and gamification systems, such as upvotes, leaderboards, and badges, to promote the most credible voices.
You own your own data
When you self-host your forum, you own the data and can export it at any time, with no dependencies on third-party platforms or APIs.
This is increasingly important as we enter an era where unique content is literally an asset.
SEO and LLM visibility
Most mature forum and Q&A software have SEO best practices built in, from automatic title tags to best internal linking practices that make it easy for search engines and AI bots to discover content.
Moderation tools
Active moderation is crucial to the success of online communities.
Choosing the right discussion board software
After extensive research, my go-to recommendations for discussion boards are Flarum and Discourse.I like Flarum for its sleek, minimalist interface and Reddit-like familiarity.
Built on PHP with Laravel components, it’s fast, lightweight, and highly extensible, supported by an active developer community.
It’s ideal for small to mid-sized businesses, startups, and niche communities.
Discourse is the gold standard for modern forums, built on Ruby on Rails and Ember.js.
It offers robust features out of the box, including SSO, analytics, trust levels, and a powerful API, plus a paid option for fully managed deployments.
Used by major brands like OpenAI, Samsung, and Shopify, it’s ideal for larger organizations, SaaS companies, and professional communities.
Honorable mention goes to NodeBB and phpBB, older platforms that require a bit more care and feeding, but also have their advantages.
Platforms built for Q&A
My go-tos here include Apache Answer and Question2Answer.
Apache Answer is a modern, actively supported platform from the Apache Software Foundation, with a solid pedigree.
Built on Go and Vue.js, it offers a full feature set – voting, accepted answers, categories, and a Reddit-style reputation system.
Question2Answer, first released in 2010 and still actively maintained, is inspired by Stack Overflow, offering features such as voting and tagging.
Its out-of-the-box interface looks dated, but a good designer can easily modernize it. It’s built in PHP.
AskBot and Scoold are also worth exploring.
Test them out. They all have links to a demo and real-world client implementations on their sites.
Find one you like. Pay $50 for a shared web hosting service, and another $50 for pizza for engineers and developers.
You’ll have a fully functional forum within a week.
Where most forums succeed – or fail
Unlike most software projects, building a discussion board or Q&A site is relatively straightforward.
But it’s maintaining and running it that will determine whether it’ll be successful.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have launched, managed, and moderated several successful discussion forums and Q&A sites over the years.
Here’s some practical advice.
Have a zero tolerance for spam
I mentioned this in my previous article; it’s the number one reason forums fail.
The moment you launch a discussion board, it will be attacked.
Fortunately, tools like Akismet, StopForumSpam, CleanTalk, and reCAPTCHA can block most spam before it reaches your site.
You can even run your server logs through an LLM to generate smart filtering rules for your CDN.
And if anything slips through, remove it fast – spam spreads apathy faster than any troll.With Q&A sites, you’ll have a bit more control, depending on how many of the questions and answers you’d like to open up to the public.
Require detailed and authentic titles
This is another Achilles’ Heel of many forums.
Discussion boards often have non-descript titles, such as “Help!” or “Need Advice!” You’ll also want to have a zero-tolerance policy toward those.
Have instructional copy that reminds them to leave detailed titles, and if any slip through the cracks, either generate a title for them or reject the post.Similarly, for Q&A sites, your titles must reflect actual questions that users ask in their own language, not the words of a marketer or other internal voice.
Seed popular topics
To understand the questions people are asking, review:
Your on-site search data.
Google Search Console data.
Customer service inquiries.
External sites like Reddit.
Post them to the discussion board from a moderator account, provide high-quality answers, and invite comments.
As long as you’re authentic and transparent, users will respond.
Establish clear, public community guidelines
Set rules and boundaries clearly up-front and display them prominently.
Keep them short enough that real users will read them, ideally 5-7 bullet points.
Some thought starters:
Linking policy: Generally, you’ll want to allow only accounts that have been vetted or passed certain criteria to be able to post links.
Reinforce tone: “Disagree without being disagreeable”
Rules against harassment and bad language.
Rules against off-topic posts.
Establish clear categories
Define categories and tags clearly.
Take a large pool of typical questions or discussion topics and categorize them. (Hint: Use your favorite LLM to help.)
Ensure that category names are immediately intuitive to users. Move or delete off-topic content quickly.
Empower trusted regulars
Over time, many forums start to attract regular visitors.
If this happens to your brand, tap into their passion by inviting them to take on small moderation privileges (e.g., editing titles, retagging, or flagging spam).
Depending on your relationship with these fans, you can incentivize them with recognition, branded merchandise, free product, or monetary compensation.
Community self-correction scales far better than centralized policing.Gamify contributions for everyone with leaderboards, badges, upvote milestones, etc.
Archive or merge duplicates
Especially in Q&A boards, you’ll want to make sure to avoid repeating questions.
That causes duplicate content issues for SEO, but worse, it can frustrate visitors.
Own the conversation before your competitors do
There are plenty more ways to run a successful discussion board or Q&A site.
But the most important rule is this: don’t treat it as an SEO tactic, an LLM feeder, or a necessary evil.
Build a destination you and your team would actually want to visit – a place for lively conversation, useful knowledge, and genuine connection with your customers and fans.
That’s the real formula for success.
A year ago, I suggested that you start a forum. This year, it’s not optional.
Reddit has proven that conversation has real value, and your competitors will soon catch on.
Claim the conversations that belong to your brand, and you’ll:
Delight customers.
Strengthen your reputation.
Drive conversions.
Become the authority AI learns from – and trusts.