Search any product category with the word "best" attached and count how many results in the top ten are forums rather than brands. On the queries I check for clients, it is routinely three or four, and often the first non-ad result.
For a while I watched agencies respond to this by writing better landing pages. That does not work. You are not losing to a page. You are losing to a format, and the format wins because searchers actively prefer it.
The correct response is to change what you are optimizing.
Why the format wins
Three things are happening at once and they compound.
Searchers append forum names to queries because they have decided brand content is untrustworthy for evaluative questions. That behavior is measurable and it signals to the engine that forum results satisfy those queries.
The threads themselves are structurally superior for evaluative intent. Multiple independent people, disagreement visible, edge cases raised, negatives stated. A brand page cannot replicate that credibly no matter how well written, because it has one author with an obvious incentive.
And retrieval systems favor this content for the same reason. Corroborated claims from multiple named participants are cheap to trust. I made this argument at length in getting cited in AI answers, and forums are the clearest example of the mechanic.
Stop competing on evaluative queries with brand pages
The strategic move is to segment your keyword set by whether a brand page can plausibly win.
Queries where you can still win: your own brand terms, product specific terms, technical how-to where you are the source of truth, transactional terms with clear purchase intent, local service terms.
Queries where a brand page will lose to forums indefinitely: "best X," "X vs Y," "is X worth it," "X alternatives," "X honest review."
I stopped letting clients spend budget on the second group as landing page projects. That does not mean abandoning those queries. It means winning them through a different mechanism: being the thing people recommend in the thread rather than the page that ranks below it.
Segment this properly rather than by feel. Running the full set through a keyword clustering tool and then splitting each cluster by intent takes an afternoon and permanently changes how you allocate.
How to actually participate without getting destroyed
Communities are extremely good at detecting marketing and extremely punitive about it. The rules that have kept my clients and me out of trouble:
Use a real named identity with disclosed affiliation. Not a brand account, not an anonymous throwaway. A person who says in their comment that they work at the company. Disclosure is not a weakness, it is what makes the comment allowable.
Answer questions where you are not the answer. The majority of what you post should have no commercial upside. If your comment history is fifty posts and forty-eight mention your product, you are a spammer and will be treated as one.
Bring specifics that only an operator has. Cost structures, failure modes, the reason a common approach breaks at scale. This is the content that gets upvoted and, later, retrieved. Generic encouragement gets ignored.
Say when a competitor is better. In the specific case where they are. This single behavior produces more credibility than anything else and it costs almost nothing in real deals, because the case where they are better is the case you would have lost anyway.
Never coordinate. No employee brigades, no seeded accounts, no upvote rings. Communities catch this and the penalty is a permanent domain ban that no amount of budget reverses.
I laid out the broader version of this in community building as marketing. The short version: you are a participant with a job, not a company with an account.
Get mentioned in threads you did not write
The higher leverage play is being named by other people.
That is downstream of product quality and customer experience, mostly, which is unhelpful advice on its own. The controllable part is making yourself easy to recommend.
Easy to recommend means: a clear one sentence description of who you are for, a memorable name, a public price or at least a price range, and a specific differentiator that a stranger can repeat in a sentence. If a happy customer cannot summarize you in a comment, they will not try.
This is the practical payoff of the positioning work in brand differentiation strategy. Positioning is not a slide. It is the sentence a customer types on your behalf when you are not in the room.
Monitor it or you are flying blind
You should know, weekly, every time your brand or your category is discussed in a forum that ranks. Not to respond to everything. To know what the narrative is.
Half the time the discovery is that people are recommending you for a use case you do not market, or warning each other about a problem your support team already solved and never publicized. Both are free strategy. The systems for catching this are the same ones in social listening strategy.
When you do respond to a negative thread, respond as a named human, acknowledge the specific thing, state what changed, and do not link anything. Links in that context read as opportunism and get downvoted into invisibility.
Publish the content forums cannot
Forums are unbeatable on evaluative questions and surprisingly weak on three things.
Depth and structure. Threads are fragmented and contradictory. A genuinely comprehensive, well organized guide still wins for people who want the whole picture rather than opinions.
Current accuracy. Highly ranked threads are frequently years old. A dated, clearly updated piece that says "the 2024 answer to this changed, here is why" competes well.
Original data. Nobody in a thread counted 140 checkout flows. You can.
That is where content investment should go, alongside the fundamentals in content that ranks and converts.
Be the recommendation, not the result
I would rather have my client named favorably in the top ranking thread than own the number four blue link under it. The mention gets the click, the trust, and increasingly the AI citation. The blue link gets a fraction of the attention and all of the skepticism.
So here is the reallocation: take a quarter of whatever you spend producing "best of" landing pages that will never rank, and spend it on a named person at your company answering hard questions in public, three hours a week, with disclosed affiliation and no links. Twelve months of that produces an asset you cannot buy and competitors cannot copy quickly. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is the only durable answer I have found to a search results page that no longer wants to feature brands.