A moderator on a popular skincare forum recently caught something odd. A user who had supposedly tried dozens of unrelated products kept steering every conversation back to one brand, complete with suspiciously specific details about ingredient concentrations and medical endorsements. It looked like a fan. It was almost certainly a marketing account.
This kind of thing used to be a minor nuisance. Now it is a business strategy, because of a shift in how people search for things online.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, or Perplexity a question today, these tools do not just generate an answer from nothing. They pull from real websites and tell you where the information came from. According to data from the SEO firm Semrush, Reddit was the single most cited website across these AI tools in a recent study, ahead of news outlets, research databases, and Wikipedia.
That is a big deal for any business that sells to consumers. If a chatbot is quoting a Reddit comment when someone asks "what is the best hypoallergenic sunscreen," getting mentioned favorably in that comment is now worth more than a search engine ad ever was.
Marketers have noticed. Reddit's own moderators, who are unpaid volunteers, are increasingly catching coordinated fake accounts, sock puppet posts, and agencies that openly claim to have engineered fake buzz to manipulate both Google and AI chatbots. One moderator described a marketing agency that bragged about "hijacking" a subreddit to boost a lesser known Korean beauty brand. Music forums have found record labels running secret accounts pretending to be fans.
The financial stakes explain why this is happening at scale. Reddit reportedly earns close to 60 million dollars a year from Google and about 70 million a year from OpenAI for the right to use its content to train and power their AI systems, together making up roughly 10 percent of Reddit's total revenue. Reddit needs that content to stay trustworthy, because trustworthiness is the entire product it is selling to Google and OpenAI. That gives Reddit a real business reason to fight spam harder than a typical website would.
There is also a legal risk that most businesses have not fully absorbed yet. The Federal Trade Commission finalized a rule in October 2024 that bans fake reviews and testimonials outright, including ones generated or dressed up with AI, with penalties that can run past 51,000 dollars for each violation. A marketing tactic that looks clever on a spreadsheet can turn into a serious liability the moment a regulator or a sharp-eyed moderator notices it.
For any business owner thinking about this space, the honest takeaway is that faking authenticity on Reddit is a worse bet than it used to be. Moderators are getting better at spotting the patterns, chatbot citation is a moving target that changes month to month, and the legal exposure is real. The businesses that will actually benefit from this shift are the ones that show up with a genuine, specific answer to a specific question, not the ones trying to plant one.