Community Intelligence: reading the communities AI engines read

Questions this guide answers

• What is Community Intelligence in SolCrys?
• How do I find which subreddits AI engines cite for my category?
• Can SolCrys post to Reddit automatically?
• How do I do Reddit outreach without getting banned?
• Does Reddit still matter for AI search?

Direct answer

Community Intelligence is SolCrys's workflow for the community source layer. It answers four questions in order: which communities do answer engines actually read for my category, which live threads are worth a reply, what would a credible reply say, and does that reply break the rules of the specific place it is going.

The flow is deliberately aim-then-fire. Building the targeting playbook is fast and costs nothing, so you can see the map before you commit any scan quota. Reviewing and editing that map is a separate step. Only then does the engine scan threads and produce drafts.

What it does not do is post. There is no API-post path anywhere in the product - drafts are copied by a person into a browser. That is the design, not an unfinished feature.

Targeting comes from citation evidence, not from keywords

Most Reddit advice starts with a keyword search and a list of large subreddits. That produces the communities with the most traffic, which is a different set from the communities an answer engine reaches for when someone asks a buying question about your category.

The playbook is built from your own measurement instead. For each candidate community it carries what the engines did over the last 90 days: how many citations came from it, how many of your tracked prompts it was cited on, and how often your brand was actually mentioned in the threads that got cited. A community that shows up repeatedly in citations for prompts you care about earns a place; a large subreddit that never appears does not.

You then edit the map before anything runs - include or exclude communities, add or remove the anchor queries used to find threads. The engine proposes; a person decides where the brand shows up.

One honest caveat on where that evidence now comes from: ChatGPT stopped showing Reddit as a visible citation in August 2026, so its contribution to this targeting signal has largely gone quiet while Google AI Overviews and Perplexity continue to cite community sources normally. The measurement behind that change, engine by engine, is in our citation study.

From thread to draft to a person

Once the map is approved, the engine scans for live threads and works through three gates before anything reaches you.

Why the loop stops at the clipboard

The obvious next feature is a publish button, and we have deliberately not built it.

Community standing is earned by an identifiable person participating over months, and it is the one AEO asset that cannot be bought back once it is spent. An automated poster is indistinguishable from the behaviour every serious community bans on sight, and the penalty lands on the brand, not on the tool. It also fails the more basic test: a reply worth posting is one a named colleague is willing to attach their name to, and that judgment cannot be delegated to a scheduler.

So the product optimises the expensive part - finding the right room, judging whether you belong in the conversation, and drafting something defensible - and leaves the thirty seconds of paste-and-send to a person who is accountable for it. Our own rules for this are published: editorial standards.

What Community Intelligence is not

Three boundaries worth stating plainly.

• Not an autoposter. No API-post path exists in the product, on any plan.
• Not a sock-puppet farm. Drafts are written for a named person with a disclosed affiliation. The workflow assumes one real account, not a pool of them.
• Not a replacement for participation. The engine finds the thread and drafts the answer; it cannot manufacture the standing that makes an answer land. A brand with no history in a community will be read as a brand with no history in a community.

Where this sits in the loop

Community Intelligence feeds the same queue everything else does. A thread worth answering becomes an action in the Action Hub with an owner, and the measurement that justified it travels with it.

Reddit is the first surface because it is where the evidence pointed. The same shape - measure where engines look, judge fit, draft under governance, stop before publishing - is how we intend to approach other community surfaces.

FAQ

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