Reddit was the single most-cited domain by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Google AI Mode in May, outranking Wikipedia, news publishers, and scholarly repositories, according to Semrush data compiled for The Verge. That citation dominance has turned the site's volunteer-moderated subreddits into prime real estate for a new class of AI-era marketing spam — and into a front line for the moderators trying to keep it out.
The mechanics are simple. When large language models pull answers from the open web, a favorable Reddit thread mentioning a brand can flow directly into a chatbot's reply. Some SEO practitioners argue that in the age of AI search, a brand no longer needs a traditional backlink to get cited — a single organic-looking mention inside a popular subreddit can be enough. That has made subreddits with high weekly traffic, like r/SkincareAddiction and its 1 million weekly visitors, targets worth gaming.
The r/SkincareAddiction case is the template. A user posting under the handle Primary-Taro4254 recommended a hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs across multiple unrelated threads, citing the product's 0.02% concentration and its acceptance by the National Eczema Association. The pattern — the same product, the same technical talking points, across different questions — tripped the community's spam radar. A moderator eventually filtered Honeydew Labs mentions for review, and the brand was flagged inside the subreddit as a suspected marketing operation. Honeydew Labs did not respond to a request for comment, and Primary-Taro4254 did not respond to a message.
Key facts
- 01Reddit was the most-cited domain in May across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Google AI Mode, ahead of Wikipedia and news publishers, per Semrush data.
- 02r/SkincareAddiction, with more than 1 million weekly visitors, banned Honeydew Labs promotions after a user account was caught posting the brand across multiple threads.
- 03Google says it has kept search results 99% spam-free for years and that Reddit gets no preference in its ranking system.
- 04Reddit only introduced native tools for businesses to build presence on the platform in May 2024.
- 05Marketers now target Reddit for 'answer engine optimization' because a mention alone — no backlink required — can surface a brand inside chatbot responses.
The tactics have evolved beyond the classic tells. Moderators used to hunt for links with tracking tags, glowing reviews, or before-and-after photos ripped from product listings. Now the spam mimics the shape of a chatbot prompt: open-ended posts like "How does everyone keep track of their skincare routine?" followed by a wave of comments recommending a specific AI skincare app. Or slightly self-deprecating product testimonials — "I thought this product would be too aggressive, but it was actually very gentle" — designed to sound like a real human's messy verdict rather than ad copy.
Maya Adivi, a r/SkincareAddiction moderator with a marketing background, said the subreddit bans accounts affiliated with brands outright and adds offending companies to keyword filters. She was recently alerted to a marketing agency that publicly claimed it had "hijacked" the subreddit to promote a Korean beauty brand and boost its Google ranking; the thread was removed and the brand blacklisted.
“It's a lot more subtle, but we've become more sophisticated as well.”— Maya Adivi, r/SkincareAddiction moderator
The marketer's playbook has a name now — answer engine optimization, or AEO, sometimes called generative engine optimization. Nobody has a settled methodology yet, which is precisely why Reddit keeps getting hit. Adivi noted that in her marketing circles, Reddit is treated as the one lever everyone agrees matters, even if nobody can prove exactly how it feeds into a chatbot's output.
Google, whose AI Overviews and AI Mode are two of the four surfaces driving Reddit citations, says its ranking systems don't privilege any specific site. Jennifer Kutz, a Google spokesperson, said Reddit "gets no special preference" and that the company's systems are built to distinguish helpful user-generated content from low-quality posts.
The economic logic behind the spam surge is straightforward. Google has been inserting AI Overviews far more frequently into commercial-intent searches — product research, brand comparisons — than a year ago, per Semrush. When a shopper's decision funnel routes through an AI summary rather than a page of blue links, the citations inside that summary determine which brands get considered at all. Reddit, trusted by both users and models precisely because its content appears to come from nowhere in particular, becomes the highest-leverage placement on the internet.
Reddit's own commercial infrastructure lags the moment. The company only introduced native tools for businesses to grow their platform presence in May 2024, meaning much of the current marketing activity is happening around the official channels rather than through them. The volunteer moderators — unpaid, often anonymous, running communities that predate Reddit's IPO — are now the effective gatekeepers of a resource that frontier AI labs and every consumer brand's marketing team wants access to.
The counterweight is that detection is a moving target. As one moderator cohort learns to spot the current generation of shill accounts, the agencies iterate — subtler language, more diverse posting histories, longer dormant periods before the promotional payload. LLMs themselves make it cheap to produce plausible-sounding testimony at scale, which means the volume of attempted spam is likely to keep climbing faster than any individual subreddit's moderation bandwidth. Google's claim of 99% spam-free results, whatever the true figure, doesn't extend to the underlying user-generated content that the models are ingesting.
Reddit's citation dominance is the clearest example yet of how AI search reshuffles the economics of the open web. Traffic that used to flow to publishers now terminates inside a chatbot, and the value has migrated to whichever sources the model quotes. That has quietly made a network of unpaid volunteers the most important spam-fighting layer in AI-mediated commerce — and if that layer buckles, the outputs of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity get measurably worse for everyone who relies on them to compare products. The frontier labs have every incentive to help Reddit's moderators win this fight; whether they'll actually invest in doing so is the open question.
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