Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam?

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Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam?

The era of AI-powered search has made Reddit mentions highly valuable. Subreddit moderators are catching brands trying to take advantage.

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Earlier this year, a Reddit user had asked members of a skincare-focused subreddit if anyone had tried a specific hypochlorous acid spray, a product often used for acne. There were dozens of responses; one from a user named Primary-Taro4254 seemed innocuous enough, at least at first.

“I haven’t personally tried [that brand] so I can’t fully compare, sorry,” they commented. “But I have been using a similar hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs and I’ve honestly really liked it.”

Primary-Taro4254 helpfully shared their experience using the spray to calm their skin’s redness and irritation, and even threw in some of Honeydew Labs’ credentials: “One thing I noticed when comparing products is that Honeydew Labs uses a 0.02% hypochlorous acid concentration and it’s also accepted by the National Eczema Association, which made me feel a bit more confident trying it on sensitive skin.”

But a closer look at Primary-Taro4254’s Reddit profile revealed that they apparently really, really liked the Honeydew Labs hypochlorous acid spray. It wasn’t just the one thread where they were praising the product — they had posted similar messages on threads about unrelated products as well as in other skincare-related subreddits. Was Primary-Taro4254 working for Honeydew Labs? Was it a marketing firm’s inartful promotional strategy? Was there a person behind it at all, or was it an automated spammer? Before long, a member of r/SkincareAddiction — a popular subreddit with more than 1 million weekly visitors — had caught on, telling others to “be aware of honeydew labs hypochlorous acid/ marketing bots.” Soon after, a moderator announced they had taken action on Primary-Taro4254 and would now automatically filter out Honeydew Labs posts for moderator review.

(Honeydew Labs didn’t respond to a request for comment. Primary-Taro4254 didn’t respond to a message sent via Reddit.)

It’s hard to overstate how central Reddit has become to how billions of people experience the web over the last several years. It has gone from a constellation of niche communities with a sometimes cantankerous user base to becoming perhaps the most urgently important website on the internet. First, users began adding “reddit” to the end of queries in order to wade through results littered with search engine optimization (SEO) junk, and in turn Google began linking to the site prominently. Now, Reddit has become significant to brands and marketers for another reason: AI chatbots love to cite it.

According to data compiled for The Verge by Semrush, an SEO company owned by Adobe, Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by AI tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini and AI Mode — more than any news publisher, repositories of scholarly articles, and even Wikipedia. AI responses are also encroaching into the online shopping journey: Semrush also found that compared to a year ago, Google is inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into search queries with commercial intent, like when shoppers are doing research on products or comparing brands.

When web traffic is funneled through LLMs instead of a traditional search results page, as Google has been doing, being cited by a chatbot becomes ever more important. Now, a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI. In an effort to try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers, marketers have descended upon Reddit, a pseudo-anonymous platform that users have come to associate with authenticity and unfiltered, truthful opinions.

They will have to get past the moderators first.

Before Maya Adivi became one of r/SkincareAddiction’s moderators, she was an active user, immediately drawn to the community’s attention to the science underpinning the beauty industry: Instead of general, simple questions like “What should I do for acne?”, users took a more rigorous approach, discussing and explaining new studies being published simply because they were passionate about the topic. Moderating for spam and promotional content has always been part of the job, Adivi says, but these days even a long, detailed breakdown of a study might be viewed with suspicion.

Years ago, moderators would look for certain telltale signs of spam or covert promotional content: a review that was a bit too glowing, product links with tracking tags, or before and after pictures that were the same as those included in product listings for the brand. AI search has changed how marketers attempt to game systems such that some SEO experts say that brands don’t even need a backlink anymore to effectively get their websites cited by a chatbot — merely a mention is enough. A suspected spammer might pose a question like “How does everyone keep track of their skincare routine?” that at first glance appears to be authentic engagement, but then a wave of comments will mention AI skincare apps, for example. Other posts might ask, “I keep seeing ads for this brand. What’s your experience with it?” Dubious spam responses might then follow a slightly self-deprecating format: “I thought this product would be too aggressive, but it was actually very gentle. Slow and steady wins the race!” Posts are often open-ended questions, mimicking how a user might prompt an AI chatbot.

“It’s a lot more subtle, but we’ve become more sophisticated as well,” Adivi says.

A brand secretly trying to promote itself becomes ‘persona non grata’

r/SkincareAddiction prohibits accounts affiliated with brands from posting in the subreddit — Adivi and other moderators will sometimes give a warning to accounts that violate the rule, but more often they will automatically ban brands and sock puppet accounts violating the rule. A brand secretly trying to promote itself becomes “persona non grata,” Adivi says. She was recently alerted to a marketing agency that claimed it had targeted and “hijacked” r/SkincareAddiction to promote an unknown Korean beauty brand and to rank on Google; Adivi removed the Reddit thread the agency used and added the brand to the keyword filtering list. Moderators are also strict about who gets to do sanctioned Ask Me Anything-style threads: It has to benefit the community, not serve as a platform to shill for your company. In the old SEO days, everyone knew that backlinks were important — in the age of AEO (“answer engine optimization”) or GEO (“generative engine optimization”), marketers are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. So they keep coming back to Reddit.

“With AEO right now, no one knows exactly how to do it, and everyone tells you how important Reddit is,” Adivi, who has a marketing background, says.

Google has its own rules around spam and manipulating its systems. In an email, Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz acknowledged there is high- and low-quality content on forums like Reddit, just as in other formats; Kutz says Google’s systems are designed to detect when user-generated content is helpful or low quality. Kutz also said that Google’s AI search features don’t aim to display content from any specific site or platform, and that Reddit “gets no special preference” in Google’s ranking system.

“There will always be bad actors trying to game the system — in fact, spamming predates the internet — and fighting spam is a core expertise for us,” Kutz told The Verge in an email. “We have strong protections against manipulation across Search, including our AI features, and we’ve kept results 99% spam-free for years.”

Reddit becoming the main character of search is amusing in some ways — only in 2024 did the company introduce native tools to help businesses grow their presence on the platform. Google has long used a website’s “authority” in its soup of search result ranking signals; Reddit, with its anonymous users and fiefdom moderation ecosystem, turns the idea of trustworthiness on its head. Reddit’s user-generated content — mountains of which LLMs have been trained on — is trusted precisely because it seems to come from nowhere in particular.

As a result of Reddit’s growing influence, the website’s legions of unpaid volunteer moderators have suddenly found themselves in a unique position: The communities they oversee and nurture are now potentially very valuable, not just to the people who love skincare and indie music but also to the brands and companies that profit from those fandoms. As advertisers and the SEO industry tweak their tactics for showing up in AI search, new segments of the internet must begin to reconcile being hyper-visible online and the weirdness that attention elicits.

Complaints about potential LLM-related spam and promotional content pop up in a diverse array of subreddits: A user on r/CleaningTips questioned whether the subreddit needs a ban on product names; another user warned the popular r/BuyItForLife community that it was being “brigaded by ad bots to skew Google and AI search results.” In its rules against self-promotion, r/FoodNYC specifically calls out brands targeting and commenting on old posts. A moderator of r/salestechniques posted a “name and shame” thread filled with brands they said were astroturfing the subreddit. Reddit itself has acknowledged the new kinds of spam. In early July, the company announced it was beefing up its spam detection tools with AI and LLMs to better catch “the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype.” The company said it is catching 25,000 spammy posts and comments and blocking 23 million spam views a day as a result.

“In Reddit’s 21 years, one constant has been that spam tactics continually evolve as new technologies emerge,” Jared Nelson, senior director of global corporate reputation communications at the company, told The Verge in an email. “Every time bad actors change their playbook, we strengthen ours.”

Reddit says that roughly 40 percent of discussions on the platform are commercial in nature

Nelson declined to name specific signals its systems look for, saying Reddit didn’t want to give bad actors a playbook for evading detection. Nelson said the company evaluates accounts when they’re created, looks for coordinated manipulation across accounts and conversations, and uses platform activity and user reports to improve detection.

Some brands have taken to spinning up their own subreddits where the company itself moderates the community in an attempt to boost a brand’s presence on the platform. Reddit and Wikipedia — places where brands can’t simply dump their press releases — have become top of mind, says Mike Moschella, director of analytics at DKC, a marketing and PR firm.

“Reddit is tricky, right? You can’t bullshit Reddit,” Moschella says. In a world where consumers are looking for answers to their highly specific, personalized questions, brands should be able to make their pitch more clearly to consumers instead of repeating the same lofty, imprecise promises of offering the best product in their category, he says. (Shopping is a huge part of Reddit: Nelson told The Verge that roughly 40 percent of discussions on the platform are commercial in nature.)

“The starting point of all business analytics is this idea that you can have a better price, you have better service, or you can have better quality, but you can’t have all three,” Moschella says. “If you say [your company’s stock] is the best stock ever in the universe, you can issue that press release a million times, but WallStreetBets [the subreddit] isn’t going to buy it if the fundamentals don’t agree.” Reddit should force brands to be more “honest and authentic,” Moschella says — at least in an ideal world.

Whether that’s actually happening is another question. It’s not just skincare subreddits feeling the effects of the brave new world of search. 404 Media reported in June that biohacking subreddits were dealing with an onslaught of promotional spam about peptides. On the weightloss subreddit r/loseit, Dan, a moderator, has gone all in on trying to spot and clean up advertiser content disguised as authentic activity. (Dan asked The Verge to use his first name only to protect his privacy as a moderator of a large subreddit.)

On r/loseit, Dan has come across covert advertiser material for everything from food scanning apps and body scanning scales to GLP-1 providers. (Moderators have compiled a “shit list of brands” that they believe are trying to secretly advertise, Dan says. Those brand mentions are automatically filtered from the subreddit.) A normal person isn’t precious about how they talk about a new smartwatch they got — they might not even mention the exact brand, Dan says. Brands, on the other hand, are cramming in keywords, using exact names, and discussing products in a positive light.

“The main advantage that we have as people who are trying to stop [brands] from advertising is that they’ve got an agenda that a normal poster doesn’t have, and that is usually fundamentally what shines through and that’s how we spot them,” he says.

Dan has also seen more and more posts he believes are AI-generated, based on certain tells: The final paragraph of a post beginning with “I’m curious to know,” for example. Between auto-moderation tools and community members proactively reporting suspected ads, r/loseit moderators are able to filter out much of the marketers attempting to promote their products.

“We want it to be human to human because that’s why I liked that subreddit anyway,” Dan says. “I found it very good for people to speak to one another outside of somewhere that’s constantly advertising to you.”

Self-promotional spam on Reddit had been happening for years, of course, to varying degrees of success. But this era of AI search manipulation comes at a time when audiences are looking for a reason to be suspicious of what they see online.

And who can blame them? Practices that have become commonplace in marketing have slowly trickled into public consciousness: paid “clipping” campaigns meant to maximize reach on short-form video feeds; bot farms spun up for PR damage control; brands pulling marketing stunts that are later revealed as ad campaigns. “The feed is fake,” Vulture declared of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Reddit was supposed to be different. Adding “reddit” to the end of search terms was a way for users to signal they wanted an answer unburdened by the SEO slop that had come to fill the web; so trusted was Reddit content that it has become shorthand for “actually useful.”

This spring, reports circulated that a marketing agency was behind some of the social media frenzy surrounding the indie rock band Geese. The behind-the-scenes involvement of the agency prompted some feelings of betrayal from the band’s fans, and the dustup became its own news cycle in music and entertainment communities — was Geese a “psyop”? Was all the fandom actually just fake engagement? Several years ago, moderators of the popular subreddit r/indieheads had caught a major record label spamming and promoting its own artists in threads, says Matty Monroe, one of the moderators. The commotion around Geese prompted Monroe and others to take another look. Moderators uncovered four accounts within a week that they believe secretly belonged to indie record labels.

“All their history was just posting and commenting about artists on their own labels and nothing else,” Monroe says. The accounts had throwaway random usernames and would swoop into threads mentioning artists on their labels. One especially suspicious comment went something like, “I can’t wait to preorder this [record] on Coral Green vinyl.” It sounded, Monroe says, like something a social media manager would post on their brand’s account. (He would know. Monroe also works as a marketing coordinator for a music distribution company.)

“We ended up getting into contact with one of those labels being like, ‘Hey, we know that you work here, so can we not do this please?’” As a compromise, r/indieheads moderators launched a label verification process that allowed record labels to participate in the subreddit while clearly identifying themselves to the public. Dozens of labels have signed up so far.

It’s not clear whether labels are jumping into r/indieheads because LLMs are citing Reddit, or if the activity is for general marketing and fan engagement purposes. But even without AI search, music subreddits like r/indieheads have become influential, precisely because people trust Reddit as a neutral platform not yet filled purely with ads. r/indieheads has become one of the “last games in town” when it comes to indie music marketing, Monroe says, as traditional publications have shuttered or pulled back their coverage.

Part of what makes Reddit feel useful is that readers feel like they can find actual advice, product recommendations, or a new band to listen to without someone’s thumb on the scale. After the Geese incident, some music fans seemed to feel uncomfortable with the idea that their new favorite band had been artificially placed in front of them on their feeds — “Was my liking this music also artificial?” some worried. It’s an understandable reaction, Monroe emphasizes. But all the bots and user-generated advertiser content in the world can’t place bodies in a stadium for a sold-out tour.

“What I do hope comes out of this all is just people realizing there’s certain things you can’t fake in the industry,” Monroe says. You also can’t astroturf your way into making listeners connect emotionally with music.

On the flip side, the prevalence of stealth marketing campaigns could end up backfiring for everyone involved, not just the brands deploying anonymous accounts. Adivi, the moderator of r/SkincareAddiction, says that often it’s the lesser-known brands behaving “egregiously” in their marketing. Skincare subreddits have helped to propel smaller brands into cult favorites, but the market has changed so much — and the subreddit has had to clamp down so much on moderation — that Adivi wonders if a new viral Reddit-approved upstart could ever take off the way they used to be able to.

“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.

• Mia SatoMia SatoFeatures Writer, The VergePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.See All by Mia Sato
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