The news: Reddit’s community engagement can give advertisers a trust advantage as the holiday shopping season nears.

• Half of US monthly social media, large language model (LLM), and ecommerce users verify AI recommendations on the platform, per a Reddit survey conducted with Attest.
• 41% of Reddit users go to the platform when they want to get a human consensus about a product or brand.
• 1 in 4 shoppers in the US, the UK, Germany, and Australia will immediately buy an item if their shopping decision is validated by Reddit content.
• During holiday shopping, about one-third of US Reddit users have read a thread debating products and options (33.4%), looked up other users’ product experiences (31.3%), or checked if a brand or deal was legitimate (30.1%), per EMARKETER and Reddit data.

The bigger picture: As audience signals weaken, and as AI pulls search traffic away from the open web, Reddit’s commercially valuable asset is the consumer intent and feedback built into what users are voluntarily discussing. Offerings like its Dynamic Product Ads lean on that material—internet communities where real people compare, recommend, and complain before spending money.

However, there is tension between authenticity and commercialization. Users themselves may be hostile to marketing that feels planted or overly polished, an aversion that could be especially prominent when ads are culturally misaligned or convey that the advertisers didn’t take the time to research their audience.

Reddit’s senior director of global product marketing, Nishé Modoyan, previously told EMARKETER that ads will perform better when they feel like contributions to conversations. “Make sure that you have a good balance of an organic and paid strategy so that you're both being a part of the conversation on the community side but also raising that brand awareness," Modoyan said.

Recommendations for marketers: Heading into the holiday season, marketers should fund organic community engagement—including AMAs and direct responses to user threads—alongside investment in paid formats. Watch for updates on Reddit’s rate of ChatGPT citations and its dispute with Google over AI training data licensing, because changes in how Reddit content surfaces in user queries could alter audience reach.

Monitor user conversations to evaluate what consumers are interested in, how products are performing, what brand perception looks like, and how shoppers are conducting their research.