The news: Reddit is using AI to address and combat marketers’ attempts to increase brand visibility in AI answers, including by planting comments and posts that can then be surfaced by AI as real opinions, per Bloomberg.

Its automated systems took down 25,000 “spammy” comments and posts per day in Q1 2026, reducing users’ exposure to such content by 20% YoY, Reddit stated in a blog post. It starts looking at signals that could suggest “fake behavior and artificial hype” as soon as an account is made.

Reddit's content removal efforts could lead other platforms that are commonly cited in AI engines to start policing brands’ attempts to manipulate those results.

The bigger picture: Reddit is the top-cited domain in large language model (LLM) responses, appearing in 11.3% of responses across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode, per Semrush. As marketers start to optimize for genAI answers rather than Google Search results, a new spam economy is emerging.

Platforms like Reddit, which have built community trust by housing honest user interactions and opinions, need to preserve the credibility of their content. The platform also has financial incentive to crack down on AI-powered spammy marketing content because its suite of ad tech tools help marketers reach and measure real communities.

• AI-generated promotional posts could distort those conversations and undermine the authenticity that makes both Reddit’s ad products and its user data valuable.
• The company is heavily reliant on ads—94% of its revenues in 2025 came from third-party advertisers—giving it incentive to push marketers toward official channels.

In addition, artificial content made in the name of GEO strategy could risk brand trust if discovered by users.

Recommendations for marketers: A spray-and-pray approach that relies on mass amounts of synthetic user posts and comments, rather than authentic community participation, could lead to account suspensions or diminished influence for marketing teams as platforms flag low-quality content.

Earn citations through genuine conversations by investing in teams with social product experience, clear product information in posts, and high-quality creative to encourage user engagement that naturally generates credible third-party signals.