Early 2024 was rough. Really rough.
Ex-employees had hijacked official-looking Asurion accounts. Hostile moderators were blocking helpful answers. And the top Google result for the brand name wasn’t Asurion’s website. It was this.
Ranking on Google. Training every AI platform.
Hijacked accounts
Former employees turned official-looking accounts into megaphones for misinformation, using credibility they built while inside the company.
Hostile moderators
The subreddit’s mods encouraged complaints and blocked positive discussion. Real customer questions got buried under grievances.
Poisoned search
Negative, often inaccurate threads dominated page 1 for the brand name and every protection-plan query that mattered.
AI learning the wrong story
ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews were being trained on those threads and repeating them back to anyone who asked.
“At the start of 2024, it was total anarchy and chaos, a completely hostile environment.”Director of Reddit Strategy, OGS Media
Same subreddit. Different community.
Drag the slider. The left side is r/Asurion when we started. The right side is the community people find today: organized support megathreads, real answers, and members posting positive claim experiences on their own.
Before
After
A community restoration, in three moves.
No promotional content. No corporate canned responses. The whole strategy was built on becoming genuinely useful to people where they were already talking.
Restore control
We removed the problematic moderators, recovered the hijacked assets, and rewrote the community rules from scratch. Within two weeks, every thread was someone trying to get real help with something brand related.
Rebuild the community
AutoMod gatekeeping, monthly support megathreads, and honest answers from actual humans. When someone asked if a protection plan was worth it, they got the real answer: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and here’s how to figure it out for your situation.
- Deprived of an audience, the hostile accounts faded out on their own
- AutoMod routed common questions to wiki answers instantly
- Problems got acknowledged instead of wrapped in corporate language
Own search and AI
Using our own tools to map where the conversations that mattered were actually happening, we built one detailed post answering every question people had about Asurion’s Amazon protection plans. The good, the bad, and the confusing parts. That single post now dominates Google for those queries and feeds the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews give.
One honest post, now the answer Google and AI give.
“Amazon Asurion protection plan: Worth it or not? (An insider’s honest take)” answered every real question, the good and the bad, and pushed the complaint threads off page 1.
- ChatGPT
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
- Reddit Answers
Don’t take our word for it. Ask Google. Or ChatGPT.
The feedback was so valuable that Amazon changed part of their protection program because of it.
When a recurring customer question surfaced through the Reddit work, our team escalated it to Amazon. They recognized the gap and moved to fix it. Not a campaign metric, a process change at one of the world’s largest companies, driven by what people said on a subreddit. The same listening loop now surfaces customer issues before they grow.
“I’m seeing a lot of complaints that we are uncovering that, outside of Reddit, would remain buried in customer service until the volume was big enough. We are able to see some of those issues and resolve them before they become larger issues.”Bettie ColomboHead of Public Relations, Asurion
Ready to own your narrative?
If negative search results, confused customers, or scattered discussions are shaping your brand without you, this approach turns them into an asset.
Let’s talk