Reddit, the web's most AI-cited domain, is drowning in AI-written spam

Reddit has become the most-cited domain by AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini, surpassing even Wikipedia, according to new data from Semrush. That makes the platform ground zero for a new kind of manipulation: marketers are flooding subreddits with AI-generated comments, hoping a chatbot will scrape the recommendation and serve it to a user researching a product. The r/SkincareAddiction subreddit recently caught a user, Primary-Taro4254, who kept praising a specific hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs across multiple unrelated threads. The account’s history read less like an enthusiastic customer and more like a bot’s output, prompting moderators to automatically filter all mentions of the brand. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that’s only getting harder.

The shift in strategy is a direct response to how search is changing. Semrush found that Google is now injecting AI Overviews into queries with commercial intent far more often than a year ago. For brands, that means the old playbook of chasing backlinks is fading; what matters now is simply being mentioned in a place a large language model trusts. Reddit, long seen as a bastion of authentic, unfiltered human opinion, is that place. “A mere mention is enough” to get cited by a chatbot, the article notes, which incentivizes a spray-and-pray approach of fake testimonials across the site.

The moderators standing in the way are volunteers like Maya Adivi of r/SkincareAddiction. She told The Verge that the subreddit’s culture was built on rigorous, science-based discussion. That culture is now a liability, as even a detailed breakdown of a study could be a sophisticated AI plant. The old telltale signs of spam — glowing reviews, tracking links — feel quaint. Now, a convincingly human-sounding comment that subtly name-drops a product’s concentration percentage and an eczema association credential is the new threat. It’s a sign that the authenticity that made Reddit valuable to both users and AI is the very thing being weaponized against it. The question isn’t whether brands will try to poison the well, but whether a volunteer moderation force can keep the water clean enough for the chatbots to drink.