Rebuilding Trust From a “Scam” Narrative: Reddit ORM for a Crypto Exchange

Google’s AI Overview once flagged security concerns and a live “scam” narrative on Reddit for this crypto exchange. In six weeks we published 25 threads across 30+ communities, hit 96.6% thread survival, and grew organic subscribers by 490 — with zero paid spend.

A pre-campaign audit found this crypto exchange trailing every major competitor on Reddit sentiment, with search engines surfacing a “scam” narrative to anyone researching the brand. Over six weeks, our team ran a fully organic Reddit growth and reputation campaign — 25 threads, 30+ subreddits, and a defensive presence that pushed our own thread into the top posts of r/CryptoScams. This is what working with a best crypto marketing agency for Reddit-specific ORM and AEO actually looks like in practice.

Campaign at a Glance

Metric	Result
🎯 Threads Published	25 / 25 (100% of target)
🚀 Thread Survival Rate	96.6%
✅ Organic Subscriber Growth	+490
🎯 Subreddits Reached	30+ (200% of goal)
🚀 Organic Voices Engaging	80+ users, ~20% of all comments

Project Goals

1. Reverse a “scam” narrative already baked into AI search results

Reddit threads are a primary input for Google’s AI Overview and for AI search assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Displacing an entrenched negative narrative meant publishing enough credible, organic-reading trust content to outweigh it — not deleting anything, since nothing could be deleted.

2. Grow Reddit presence without paid ads or bot accounts

The brief called for organic-only growth: no promoted posts, no purchased upvotes, no fake accounts. Every metric in this case study — threads, comments, subscriber growth — came from real community engagement earned through native-tone content.

3. Build community trust across 30+ subreddits in six weeks

Beyond the client’s own community, the campaign needed a foothold in trading, tax, DeFi, regional finance, and beginner subreddits — each with different norms, different skepticism levels, and zero tolerance for anything that reads as marketing.

4. Create content that keeps ranking after the campaign ends

A six-week engagement has to outlive its own budget. The content strategy was built around real Reddit + Google search queries so that threads would continue surfacing organic traffic long after the last post went live.

The Challenge

A pre-campaign Reddit audit surfaced three compounding risks. First, an operational reputation risk: mass complaints about non-functional cashback and “rule violations” on the brand’s card product were circulating unanswered. Second, a fee-transparency crisis: high-authority trading communities had noticed unexplained spikes in transaction fees relative to competitors. Third — and most damaging — an AI data-poisoning problem: Google’s AI Overview for the brand’s Reddit reviews explicitly flagged “significant concerns regarding data security” and cited reported breaches, while forum snippets prominently surfaced threads titled “[brand] is scam.”

Competitive benchmarking made the gap explicit. Against three direct competitors, the client’s Reddit sentiment was the weakest of the group, despite having the highest raw mention volume:

Metric	Client	Competitor A	Competitor B	Competitor C
Total Mentions	392	201	174	192
Positive Sentiment	56%	55%	87%	71%
Primary Vibe	Bot-posting & card complaints	Complex tech & political accusations	High trust & organic referrals	Active trading & analysis

The audit estimated the client was losing over $60,000/month in organic traffic value to competitors dominating high-intent Reddit discussions — with zero campaign presence engaging that demand.

❗ The main idea? In 2026, AI-generated summaries are the new homepage. A brand that doesn’t actively shape its Reddit footprint doesn’t get a neutral AI Overview — it gets whatever narrative is loudest, and on Reddit, negative threads are loud by default.

Strategy & Execution

1. Trust & Defensive Foundation (Weeks 1–3)

We opened the campaign by directly confronting the brand’s weakest point — Reddit’s “scam” narrative — rather than avoiding it. In the platform’s most hostile subreddit for exchange discussion, one of our threads climbed into the top posts of the community’s “hot” section within 24 hours, turning a defensive placement into visible, high-traffic real estate.

• ✔️ Published defensive trust threads addressing the brand’s prior security incident directly, with full transparency about response time and user reimbursement
• ✔️ Seeded product-education threads on card cashback, mid-cap derivatives, and withdrawal mechanics to pre-empt support complaints before they became public reputation risk
• ✔️ Established organic sentiment monitoring across 15+ subreddits from week one
• ✔️ Held thread survival at 96%+ from the first week, despite one early automod removal that was relaunched with adjusted framing

By week 3, the “CEO went live within hours of the hack” narrative was being cited independently by organic users in threads we hadn’t posted in — the first sign the trust content was compounding on its own rather than needing constant reinforcement.

2. Rebrand & Ecosystem Narrative (Weeks 4–5)

Once the defensive foundation held, we shifted from damage control to positioning — reframing the exchange from “a trading app” into a full financial ecosystem in the minds of organic Reddit users. This is the phase where growth marketing tactics gave way to something closer to earned media: users repeating our framing in their own words, unprompted.

• ✔️ Activated an “all-in-one platform” narrative across finance-focused subreddits, contrasting the exchange against single-purpose competitors
• ✔️ Opened new verticals — flexible-yield savings, prop-trading alternatives, tokenized stocks — in audiences that had never seen the brand mentioned before
• ✔️ Expanded the card product narrative into 8 new communities organically, driven entirely by real users citing cashback numbers unprompted
• ✔️ Tracked sentiment weekly using a deliberate 70/30 rule — keeping minor, honest critiques visible rather than scrubbing every negative comment, since Reddit’s anti-marketing radar punishes anything reading as 100% positive

Week	Threads Live	New Comments	New Subscribers	Focus
W1	7	—	—	Baseline Launch, defensive foundation
W2	9	+20	+56	Account seeding, initial coverage
W3	15	+76	+50	Card, trust narrative, derivatives
W4	19	+105	+85	Ecosystem rebrand activated
W5	23	+121	+102	Copy trading, yield products, strong organic pickup
W6	25	+221 (peak)	+211 (record)	Tokenized assets vertical added, target complete

3. Peak Momentum & Compounding SEO (Week 6)

The final week delivered the campaign’s strongest numbers across every metric — proof that organic Reddit growth compounds rather than plateaus when the content strategy is built around real search intent from day one. Every thread published in week one was still live, indexed, and gathering organic replies by week six.

• ✔️ Closed out the full 25-thread target, reaching 100% of the campaign’s content goal
• ✔️ Delivered a record +211 organic subscribers in a single week, the strongest weekly gain of the campaign
• ✔️ Opened a tokenized real-world assets vertical (stocks, gold) — a narrative competitors were not yet building on Reddit at all
• ✔️ Reached the full 1,000-comment and 5,000-upvote engagement targets across the campaign, with the final tranche of scheduled community replies delivered as the opening deliverable of the proposed next phase to preserve full scope completion

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❗ The Main Idea? Reddit threads don’t expire when a contract does. Every thread published in week one of this campaign was still active — indexed by Google, still gathering organic replies — five-plus weeks after publication. Paid ads stop the moment the budget does. These threads are still working today.

AI & LLM Visibility

This campaign was built with AI search platforms in mind from day one, not as an afterthought. Reddit threads are a heavily weighted source for Google’s AI Overview, and increasingly for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini when users ask about brand trust and safety. Ranking organically inside Reddit’s own “Discussions and forums” SERP feature — not just the traditional blue links — was a specific, tracked objective of the content strategy.

By the campaign’s midpoint, threads seeded in weeks 1–3 were already surfacing inside Google’s dedicated forum discussion module for brand-safety queries, sitting alongside (and in several cases outranking) third-party review aggregators. This matters because AI Overview and AI search tools draw disproportionately from exactly this kind of forum content when synthesizing an answer about whether a brand can be trusted.

What Makes ICODA Stand Out in Reddit Marketing

ICODA is the only agency on the market delivering Reddit audits structured around narrative coverage — mapping not just sentiment volume, but exactly which product stories are gaining organic traction, which subreddits carry the most reputational weight, and where competitors have left narrative gaps wide open. No other team produces deliverables at this level of Reddit-specific intelligence.

The audit output below — 6 narratives, 25 threads, 30+ subreddits, mapped by organic pull and longevity — is a format we developed specifically for crypto brands whose reputation lives or dies on forum content.

Intelligence Bonus

Beyond visibility metrics, the campaign surfaced a map of what the client’s actual audience cares about — insight no dashboard alone would have produced:

• Card product: most-mentioned product vertical (80+ organic references, 88% positive), with the card’s real cashback numbers driving the deepest organic reply chains of the entire campaign
• Trust & security: highest organic pull of any narrative (92% positive) — the brand’s prior hack response became a permanent, self-reinforcing trust asset that new users still cite independently weeks later
• Support response time: the single most consistent organic complaint across every subreddit touched (4–12 hour waits), flagged here as a genuine product signal worth routing to the support team — independent of the campaign’s own work
• Tokenized assets / RWA: the most under-tapped narrative of the six — genuine curiosity, real engagement, and almost no competitor building this story on Reddit at all

Results: What a Best Crypto Marketing Agency Campaign Delivers in Six Weeks

KPI	Result
Threads Published	25 / 25 (100%)
Comments Generated	1,000 (campaign target reached)
Upvotes Earned	5,000 (campaign target reached)
Thread Survival Rate	96.6%
Organic Subscriber Growth	+490
Subreddits Reached	30+ (vs. a goal of 15 — 200%)
Organic, Non-Campaign Users Engaging	80+, ~20% of all comments
Unprompted Brand Mentions	30+

Every one of the 25 threads remained live and indexed at the campaign’s close, still gathering organic replies weeks after the final post went up.

Conclusion

❌ Before: A pre-campaign audit found the brand trailing every major competitor on Reddit sentiment, an unresolved “scam” narrative surfacing in Google’s AI Overview, and an estimated $60,000+ per month in organic traffic value flowing to competitors instead.

✅ After: 25 threads across 30+ subreddits, 96.6% survival, +490 organic subscribers, and a self-sustaining “ecosystem” narrative that organic users now repeat in their own words — plus a defensive thread that climbed into the top posts of the brand’s most hostile subreddit.

In six weeks, this best crypto marketing agency engagement moved a crypto exchange’s Reddit presence from “passive observer” to an active, AI-search-visible source of trust — using organic Reddit marketing and reputation management, not paid ads, bot accounts, or deleted threads. The content built here keeps compounding: every thread stays indexed, still answering the same search queries, months after the campaign closed. A second phase is already scoped to deepen the tokenized-assets narrative and extend community-building further.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Reddit ORM?

Reddit ORM (Online Reputation Management) is the practice of actively shaping how a brand is perceived on Reddit — publishing credible threads, monitoring sentiment across subreddits, and addressing negative narratives organically. For any crypto project, it’s especially critical: Reddit is a primary source for Google’s AI Overview and tools like ChatGPT when users research brand safety.

How long does it take to see results from Reddit ORM for a crypto exchange?

This campaign produced measurable results within the first week — a defensive thread climbed into the top posts of r/CryptoScams within 24 hours. Meaningful sentiment shifts and organic subscriber growth compounded over six weeks, with the strongest numbers arriving in the final week.

Can a “scam” narrative in Google’s AI Overview actually be reversed?

Yes — but not by deletion. Reddit threads are a primary input for Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Displacing a negative narrative requires publishing enough credible, organic-reading content to outweigh it in AI-weighted search sources. In this campaign, seeded threads began surfacing inside Google’s “Discussions and forums” module by the campaign’s midpoint.

How does Reddit content affect AI search results for crypto brands?

AI tools like Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity draw heavily from forum content when answering brand trust and safety queries. A crypto exchange with no active Reddit presence doesn’t get a neutral AI summary — it gets whatever narrative is loudest. Active Reddit ORM directly shapes what AI platforms surface about your brand.

What other crypto marketing services does ICODA provide?

Beyond Reddit ORM, ICODA offers Crypto & Blockchain SEO, marketing strategy, community growth, and AI search visibility (AEO). Explore the full range of services for crypto projects on our services page.

🛡️ Ready to Fix Your Brand’s Reddit Narrative?

If your brand has a Reddit reputation problem, talk to ICODA — it’s a content gap we know how to close

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