Fake Reddit Posts Are Hijacking What AI Tells You
Fake Reddit Posts Are Hijacking What AI Tells You
Publish Date: 2026-06-12 18:03:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
In late May, moderators of r/Biohackers, a Reddit community with roughly 830,000 members, restricted new standalone posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy.
The subject matter was not the issue, 404 Media reported June 3. Peptide and HRT companies had been flooding the community with coordinated promotional posts designed to be scraped by artificial intelligence systems and surfaced as answers in ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and other AI search tools.
The tactic has a name: answer engine optimization, or AEO. Where traditional SEO aimed to rank pages in Google’s index, AEO targets the source material AI systems pull from when constructing answers. The goal is not a link users click. It is a sentence an AI speaks.
Reddit sits near the top of that source pool. Between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit was the most cited domain by Google AI Overviews and Perplexity and the second-most cited by ChatGPT, analytics platform Profound found in June 2025. Google’s AI Overviews cite Reddit in 21% of responses, analytics firm Demandsage revealed in December.
That reach is what makes the platform a target.
The Tactics Are Getting Harder to Catch
The campaigns are not crude spam. Operators use accounts with established posting histories designed to look like ordinary users, TechSpot reported June 4. In some cases, real people are paid to post, blurring the line between genuine discussion and coordinated promotion.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
“You literally just sort of know what to look for,” one moderator said, per the report. “But the problem is you don’t want to become punitive to the people who aren’t doing this maliciously.”
Marketing firms are selling AEO services openly. The top 100 tracked subreddits account for about 84% of recent brand mentions in AI-generated answers, Startup Fortune reported June 3. A campaign does not need to be broad. Seeding a small number of high-traffic communities can reliably shift what AI systems…
