Your buyer Googles you before they sign up. What do they find?

0:00Pull out your phone, open an incognito tab and Google your company name. Look at the first 10 results and scroll past them and go straight to the AI overview. Then click into Reddit threads. This is basically what your buyer is looking at before they sign up. I'll show you the data on what buyers actually do before they ever land on your website and how to stop letting strangers narrate your product. I'm Deian, and this is Before They Buy. Your homepage isn't the first page about

0:32you. It might not be even in the top five. Here's what shows up when a buyer searches your brand. It's usually a G2 listing your team hasn't touched in a few years, a Capterra page where the pricing is wrong, or some Reddit thread from 2023 when someone called your onboarding clunky. Then your homepage. Most founders have never actually done this search. They've typed their brand into Google while they were logged in. They've gotten their own site and assume that's what everyone else gets. This is not the case. You'll see that it's mostly built by other people about

1:06your product and you didn't write any of it. In October 2025, G2 bought Capterra Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner. One company now owns four of the top review site results of every software category. They reach 200 million annual buyers across 6 million reviews. And here's the bigger thing. There's research showing the buyer reads all of that, then they rank you against competitors, and then they decide who they're going to buy from before they ever fill out a form on your site.

1:38Back in episode 1, I said that your competitor probably has a page comparing you to them, and this is basically the bigger version of the same problem. Your category has a whole page about you, you just don't know what it says. G2 ran a buyer behavior report in 2024, and only 9% of buyers consider vendor websites a reliable source. Forrester ran Trust Research a couple of years back and surfaced again in Ross Simmonds' Reddit Dark Funnel piece. What he found was that peers in the industry get trusted by 90 plus percent.

2:14Existing customers of the product get trusted 85 percent. Coworkers still a solid 82. And vendor sales reps only 29 percent. So the person on your sales team is trusted by less than a third of the buyers they call. If we look at the 6sense published buyer experience report from 2025, we can see that 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist in order before they ever talk to sales. The key thing here is that the vendor ranked number one wins 80% of the time.

2:45Gartner also surveyed 632 B2B buyers in late 2024. And what they found out was that 61% prefer a rep-free buying experience. They don't want to go to your website and on the pricing page not be able to sign up for a trial, but have to fill out some form so that they get called up by a sales rep. Robert Blaisdell, who is the VP analyst at Gartner, put it quite bluntly. Bad prospecting actively damages relationships with potential customers.

3:18So by the time someone sees a name on a demo form, the decision is mostly made. It just was made by pages that you don't own. Let's look at a concrete example from Ross Simmonds, who runs Foundation Marketing. Because he's been tracking what I previously mentioned, the Reddit Dark Funnel for software. And here's what he has documented. Reddit shows up in 97.5% of product review queries on Google. 72% of tech decision makers say that they use Reddit when evaluating software.

3:51This is not from Reddit's own marketing, but it's a Forrester number from 2025. And it isn't really surprising because Google signed in 2024 a 60 million deal with Reddit, which catapulted the monthly visits of this network by a lot, from 57 million monthly visits to 427. Reddit also got dumped into a lot of AI overviews. Back in November 2024, they were in about 2,300. By mid-2025, they were already in 8 million AI overviews.

4:25This is one of the reasons why so many SaaS founders really focus heavily on Reddit. It's just the most cited domain in Google's AI overviews, and it also works really well inside Perplexity. If you want to give it a try yourself, I highly recommend going to dedicated subreddits like r/saas for SaaS, which has over 336,000 members. Go to DevOps, cybersecurity, or anything that's really related to your tool and search for your category and read the top threads.

4:58You can see that people share real issues, success stories, and some of them directly, but some try not to directly promote their SaaS company. Of course, when it comes to Reddit and all of this, I hear a lot of pushbacks every time. So let me get into three of those. One of them is that our product is good, but word of mouth handles everything already. That's a big maybe, because word of mouth still ends in a Google search. You might just search for your brand.

5:29And the friend who recommends you doesn't necessarily close a deal. They might just casually mention you. So when the potential buyer Googles your name, they read whatever comes up. They're not going to dig too deep into it. So if the SERP contradicts the recommendation, then the recommendation loses. The second thing I hear is we don't have time to manage Reddit. You're also not really managing Reddit, you're reading it. You can do it once a month. You can just search for your brand and just keep up with it. Or right now there are a lot of Reddit marketing tools that do everything for you.

6:02They scrape relevant Reddit threads, they identify pain points that are related to you, and then they just suggest that you should comment there or DM specific people. So most of the work's already done. And the third thing is G2 reviews aren't worth chasing because everyone knows they're gamed. While 73% of buyers do suspect that, their listings still anchor every category SERP. If the pricing on your G2 page is stale, that's a really bad signal. And G2 owns four of the top results in your category right now.

6:37So if your profile is empty or wrong, then your main competitors have a really big advantage. Here's what I want you to do today. Five things, and none of them require a big marketing team. First one is, open an incognito tab and Google your brand. If you're not in the US, then I highly recommend getting a VPN changing to a US server so you can actually see US results. write down every URL on the page that isn't yours and then read what they write about you.

7:07Number two, check all of the big software listicle sites, so G2, Capterra, Github, and SoftwareAdvice. Check if the pricing is accurate, if the feature list is cracked, if the screenshots are up to date. Update anything that you can that is wrong right now. Number three, go to Reddit, search for your brand, and dig through the subreddits where your buyers actually live. It can be the SaaS subreddit I mentioned, DevOps, cybersecurity, sysadmin. So pick the ones that match and read the top threads about your category.

7:39Number four, find one thread where your buyer is asking the question your product answers. And reply with your name, role and what it actually tells them if they emailed you. Don't pitch them and don't add any tracking links. This will get you banned really quickly on Reddit and they're quite strict about it right now. So just be helpful. And number five, build a comparison page and alternatives page that I talked about in episode one and seven. Those pages show up when the buyer Googles you next to a competitor.

8:10Tonight, before you go to sleep, search your company name in incognito and read what your buyer reads. If you don't recognize the story, write a better one. This is Before They Buy. I'm Deian. See you next week.