Earlier this year, a Reddit user asked members of a skincare-focused subreddit whether anyone had tried a specific hypochlorous acid spray used for acne. Dozens of responses appeared; one from an account named Primary-Taro4254 seemed harmless at first. The user said they had not personally tried the brand in question but recommended a similar product from Honeydew Labs, praising its concentration and National Eczema Association acceptance. A closer look at the account’s history revealed near-constant praise for Honeydew Labs across multiple threads. Community members quickly flagged the account as a marketing bot, and moderators began automatically filtering Honeydew Labs posts for review.
The episode is part of a much larger shift in how brands and marketers try to game Reddit. As AI chatbots have become prominent tools for product research, Reddit has become the internet’s most trusted source of organic human opinion. That makes it invaluable for AI search engines and, in turn, a magnet for stealth marketing campaigns. Reddit moderators now find themselves on the front line of an entirely new battle: trying to keep AI-driven SEO spam from overwhelming the communities they run.
Reddit’s rise to search dominance
Reddit has moved from a collection of niche discussion boards to one of the most important websites on the internet. Users began adding “reddit” to queries to find real answers among SEO-riddled results. Google responded by elevating Reddit in search rankings. More recently, AI chatbots have made Reddit their favorite citation. Data from SEO company Semrush found that in May, Reddit was the most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, and Google’s AI Mode. It ranked ahead of news outlets, academic repositories, and Wikipedia. AI-powered answers are also increasingly appearing in shopping queries, making it even more important for brands to appear in chatbot responses.
This creates an obvious incentive. If a chatbot summarizes Reddit opinions, then a brand that can plant convincing positive comments on Reddit may influence what the AI says. In the past, marketers focused on backlinks and search engine rankings. Now, a single mention on a popular subreddit could be enough to get picked up by an LLM. According to marketers and SEO experts, this practice has been described as answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO). Since no one knows exactly how AI engines weigh sources, many brands throw everything at Reddit and hope something sticks.
A new kind of spam
Maya Adivi, a moderator of r/SkincareAddiction, has seen the change firsthand. She joined the community because users took a rigorous, science-based approach to beauty discussions. Moderating for spam has always been part of the job, but today even a detailed breakdown of a study can be viewed with suspicion. Years ago, moderators looked for telltale signs: overly glowing reviews, product links with tracking tags, or before-and-after photos copied from listings. Now the signs are subtler. A suspected spammer might pose an open-ended question like, “How does everyone keep track of their skincare routine?” and then a wave of replies promotes the same app. Other posts ask, “I keep seeing ads for this brand. What’s your experience with it?” and dubious responses follow a slightly self-deprecating format.
“It’s a lot more subtle, but we’ve become more sophisticated as well,” Adivi says. r/SkincareAddiction prohibits accounts affiliated with brands from posting. Adivi says a brand caught secretly promoting itself becomes persona non grata. She recently removed a thread used by a marketing agency that claimed it had hijacked the subreddit to promote an unknown Korean beauty brand. Moderators are strict about AMA-style posts too: they must benefit the community, not serve as a platform for a company. With AEO, Adivi notes, “no one knows exactly how to do it, and everyone tells you how important Reddit is.”
Platforms respond
Google says it is aware of the problem. A Google spokesperson said the company has systems designed to detect helpful or low-quality user-generated content. The spokesperson added that Reddit gets no special preference in Google ranking systems and that Google’s AI features do not target content from any specific site. “There will always be bad actors trying to game the system,” the spokesperson said, noting that Google has kept search results 99% spam-free for years. Skeptics point out that Google’s own moves to elevate forums like Reddit have made them more attractive targets for manipulation.
Reddit itself has acknowledged the new threat. In early July, the company announced it was upgrading its spam detection tools with AI and LLMs to catch what it called “highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype.” The company says it now catches 25,000 spammy posts and comments and blocks 23 million spam views a day. Reddit’s senior director of global corporate reputation communications, Jared Nelson, said spam tactics continually evolve as new technologies emerge. “Every time bad actors change their playbook, we strengthen ours,” he said. Nelson declined to detail specific detection signals, arguing that doing so would give bad actors a playbook for evasion.
The pressure on moderators
Reddit’s volunteer moderators have unexpectedly become guardians of brand value. The communities they oversee are now valuable not just to users but to companies trying to shape AI search results. Complaints about LLM-related spam appear across a wide range of subreddits. On r/CleaningTips, a user wondered whether the subreddit should ban product names. Another warned r/BuyItForLife that it was being “brigaded by ad bots to skew Google and AI search results.” r/FoodNYC specifically calls out brands that target and comment on old posts. A moderator of r/salestechniques posted a thread naming brands they said were astroturfing the community.
On r/loseit, a moderator named Dan says he has seen an increase in covert advertisements for food scanning apps, body scanning scales, and GLP-1 providers. Dan, who asked to use only his first name for privacy, says moderators have compiled a “shit list of brands” believed to be secretly advertising. Mentions of those brands are automatically filtered. He says brands often reveal themselves by cramming in keywords, using exact product names, and always discussing products in a positive light. “They’ve got an agenda that a normal poster doesn’t have,” Dan says. “That is usually fundamentally what shines through.” He also notices AI-generated posts with telltale phrasing, such as a final paragraph starting with “I’m curious to know.” Despite the volume, he says auto-moderation and community reports have helped keep the subreddit human.
Brands and authenticity
Some marketers believe Reddit forces a level of honesty that traditional advertising lacks. Mike Moschella, director of analytics at marketing and PR firm DKC, says brands can’t simply dump press releases on Reddit. “You can’t bullshit Reddit,” he says. Moschella notes that Reddit discussions are heavily commercial in nature; data shared by Reddit’s Jared Nelson indicates that roughly 40 percent of discussions on the platform involve commerce. But Moschella argues that brands that succeed on Reddit must offer something real: a better price, better service, or better quality. Repeating a vague claim that a product is the best in its category won’t convince communities like WallStreetBets.
Yet the pressure to show up in AI answers may push brands toward less authentic behavior. The very anonymity that makes Reddit seem authentic also makes it easier for brands to create fake personas. And because AI systems are trained on Reddit content, a handful of planted comments could theoretically shape what a chatbot tells millions of users. That has led to an arms race between moderators and marketers. Moderators use keyword filters, site-wide tools, and their own intuition; brands respond with more sophisticated account histories, longer comments, and questions designed to mimic real user prompts.
The music industry problem
The trend is not limited to consumer products. This spring, reports emerged that a marketing agency was behind some of the social media frenzy around the indie rock band Geese. The revelation prompted feelings of betrayal among fans and raised questions about whether the fandom was manufactured. In the aftermath, moderators of r/indieheads took another look at their community. Matty Monroe, one of the moderators, said they uncovered four accounts in a single week that appeared to belong to indie record labels. The accounts had random usernames and spent their entire history posting and commenting only about artists on their own labels. One suspicious comment read: “I can’t wait to preorder this [record] on Coral Green vinyl.” Monroe, who also works as a marketing coordinator for a music distribution company, recognized the language of a social media manager.
r/indieheads reached out to one label and asked it to stop. In a compromise, the moderators launched a label verification process that lets record labels participate in the subreddit while clearly identifying themselves. Dozens of labels have signed up. Monroe says music subreddits have become one of the “last games in town” for indie music marketing as traditional publications have shrunk. But he acknowledges that even if bots can create buzz, they can’t manufacture genuine emotional connection with music or fill a stadium on tour.
The unintended consequences
The battle against stealth marketing may have collateral damage. Adivi, the r/SkincareAddiction moderator, says that lesser-known brands often behave most egregiously. Skincare subreddits have helped small brands become cult favorites, but the market has changed so much that Adivi wonders whether a new viral, Reddit-approved upstart could still take off. “The unfortunate thing is it does mean I end up being more suspicious of smaller brands, even though I would love to see more small brands out in the world,” she says.
As AI search reshapes the web, Reddit’s volunteer moderators remain the primary defense against a flood of manufactured authenticity. They are asked to distinguish between a genuine enthusiast and a well-funded marketing operation, often with only instinct and context clues. The stakes are high: if users lose trust in Reddit as a space for honest, human conversation, the site would lose the very quality that makes it valuable to AI companies and brands in the first place. That is the paradox at the heart of Reddit’s new role. The more influential Reddit becomes, the more it is targeted by those who would dilute its authenticity. And the more it is targeted, the harder it becomes to preserve the thing that made it worth trusting.
Source: The Verge News