When a user asks a chatbot which product they should buy, the answer increasingly includes experiences found on Reddit. Trust in such conversations has opened space for a new type of marketing, in which brands and agencies publish seemingly spontaneous recommendations with the intention of having tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini later present them as authentic user opinions.
The problem is no longer limited to traditional promotional messages, links or automated comments that are easy to recognize. Posts are written to imitate everyday conversations, personal experiences and advice from community members. Their real audience is not only the people reading a particular subreddit, but also the AI systems searching the internet to formulate an answer to a user’s question.
Reddit has therefore improved its automated systems for detecting coordinated behavior, artificial interest and covert product promotion. During the first quarter of 2026, the platform identified around 25,000 spam posts and comments per day, while user exposure to such content fell by 20 percent compared with the same period of the previous year.
The company does not necessarily attribute the increase in detected cases to a greater volume of spam, but to more precise tools. The new systems analyze account behavior from the moment of registration, while large language models help identify patterns that may appear harmless individually but collectively indicate an organized effort to create artificial popularity.
Reddit’s value for this approach to marketing is also connected to its relationship with OpenAI and Alphabet, the owner of Google. Both companies have agreements that give their AI products access to content from the platform. Discussions on forums are often perceived as more direct and credible than content published by brands themselves.
This environment has accelerated the development of generative engine optimization, or GEO. Unlike traditional SEO, which aims to secure a better position in search results, GEO seeks to ensure that the name of a company or product appears in the responses generated by AI tools.
The line between legitimate visibility efforts and manipulation has not yet been clearly defined. A brand can publish high-quality and useful content that a chatbot may find, but it can also create a fabricated recommendation presented as the experience of an independent user. The latter practice has become one of the main reasons why Reddit is tightening its control over posts.
Research by Cornell Tech has also shown that such content can influence AI results, finding that responses produced by AI research tools can be steered through carefully placed user-generated content. This gives marketers a reason to continue experimenting, even when they cannot guarantee how long their posts will remain available.
Shanzila Ahmed, founder of ReachLLM, works with brands seeking to increase the number of mentions they receive in chatbot responses. Some content her company posted on Reddit appeared in ChatGPT responses within a single day, but the platform later removed it. Such results show how quickly a post can enter an AI-generated answer, but also how unstable the entire approach remains.
Interest in GEO is also attracting investors. Profound, a company developing tools for monitoring and improving brand visibility in AI responses, reached a valuation of more than $1 billion following a funding round in February.
Removing such content does not depend on technology alone. Community moderators were responsible for more than 52 percent of removed posts and comments during the second half of 2025, while some brands are trying to increase their influence by launching their own specialized subreddits. Reddit is therefore becoming a place where marketers use AI to enter chatbot responses, while the platform uses the same technology to identify marketing presented as authentic user opinion.
