AI has turned Reddit into a B2B marketing battleground

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116 million people log on to Reddit every single day.

But marketers have mostly stayed away because advertising somewhere you can't control the conversation is risky. Post something that reads like a press release, and Reddit users don't politely ignore you. They downvote you, argue with you, and occasionally take screenshots to make fun of you in another thread.

But the upside kept growing:

Then AI made Reddit even more valuable as the platform became one of the most cited sources across ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, and Perplexity. And it kicked off three pretty important shifts marketers should understand.

The majority of the time, a Reddit comment is a stranger's honest opinion, which is exactly why buyers trust it and why AI models found it useful in the first place.

So naturally, a paid industry emerged to manufacture that appearance. Agencies started creating Reddit posts and comments designed to look like genuine recommendations while quietly promoting the company paying for them. And increasingly, the goal is to get those posts scraped by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, and other AI systems.

Marketers have lumped much of this work under generative engine optimization, or GEO, and serious money is already flowing into the category. Profound, one company affiliated with GEO software and services, hit a $1 billion valuation after a funding round in February.

Another agency doing this work called ReachLLM, told Bloomberg it has gotten new Reddit posts cited by ChatGPT within a day. Founder Shanzila Ahmed's team has also created and moderated its own subreddits, giving the agency more control over what gets published and what stays up long enough to be scraped.

But Reddit is now using its own AI to detect what it calls “highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype” that older moderation systems missed.

In Q1, the company says it caught 25,000 spammy posts and comments per day, helping reduce what users actually saw by 20% year-over-year.

Some of Ahmed's own posts have been removed as a result, but that hasn't changed the strategy.

“That is just something that we have to work around. We just need to keep pushing out good new content at regular intervals so that even if it gets removed, there's new content that can get cited,” Ahmed said.

However, earlier this month, something changed.

On August 14, ChatGPT's Reddit citations dropped roughly 80% from where they had been the week before, according to Petra Labs.

And Reddit wasn't alone. YouTube fell 88%, TikTok dropped 72%, LinkedIn declined 36%, and Facebook fell 28%. Whatever happened affected social platforms broadly, but Reddit took one of the biggest hits.

The timing made Reddit's spam crackdown an obvious theory. Fewer coordinated posts get through moderation, less manufactured content gets indexed, and fewer Reddit posts make their way into AI answers.

Possible? Absolutely. Proven? No.

Petra Labs wouldn't commit to that explanation, and several others are just as plausible: changes to crawler access, a licensing issue between Reddit and OpenAI, or simply models shifting toward other sources.

Petra Labs looked beyond citation counts and found that the brands appearing in AI answers had barely changed. Ask ChatGPT for the best mattress today, for example, and you'll likely get roughly the same companies you would have gotten in July. The difference is where the answer points.

In many cases, Reddit disappeared, and a company's own website or a review site took its place.

As Petra Labs' Akkawi put it, “citation share went to owned sites and review sites.”

AJ Kieffer, a VP at Conductor, had already found something that helps explain why. His team studied the kinds of queries where Reddit appears in AI-generated answers and noticed that “when Reddit does show up, it's often the sole citation.”

His interpretation wasn't that Reddit had become the internet's ultimate authority. It was that nobody else had written a sufficiently useful answer.

Kieffer's team found those gaps tend to appear around comparisons shaped by a specific use case, vendor evaluations for a particular type of buyer, troubleshooting after something doesn't work as advertised, and recommendations involving several requirements at once.

Those are decision-stage questions, and they're also the kinds of questions corporate content tends to answer poorly.

Reddit users don't have that problem. Someone will happily tell you Product A is great for one thing, terrible for another, too expensive, annoying to onboard, and still the product they'd buy again.

That's what we all should be paying attention to.

Here are some products we find useful and would encourage you to implement in your company.