The growing importance of Reddit in AI-generated answers was always going to create a second-order effect: people would eventually start trying to manipulate it.
Harpreet recently highlighted an interesting example on X. According to his analysis, a Reddit account that had been largely inactive for more than three years suddenly changed behaviour around nine months ago. The account began repeatedly mentioning Semrush and Ahrefs while responding to questions involving competing products.
The interesting part isn't whether this particular account proves an organized AEO campaign. It doesn't. One account is not enough evidence for that conclusion.
What matters is the pattern.
Screenshot: Harpreet highlighting what he describes as an example of Reddit being used for AEO visibility.
Lily Ray noticed the same post and said the case would be interesting to investigate further. That distinction matters: this is something worth examining, not something that has already been proven.
The incentive, however, is easy to understand.
Reddit has become an important source for AI answer engines. If ChatGPT, Google and other systems retrieve Reddit discussions when constructing answers, appearing naturally inside those discussions could potentially influence which brands and products those systems encounter.
And where visibility exists, optimization — and eventually manipulation — tends to follow.
The idea isn't entirely theoretical. AEO practitioners have already discussed companies attempting to create or operate Reddit accounts at scale to place product mentions into relevant conversations. The more sustainable alternative they describe is much simpler: participate transparently and provide genuinely useful answers rather than manufacturing recommendations.
This also adds another dimension to our recent NetContentSEO experiment examining whether ChatGPT still prefers Reddit as a citation source.
If Reddit's role in AI answers changes over time, spam pressure could become one of the reasons why.
That gives us a new question worth testing:
Can attempts to optimize Reddit for AI visibility eventually change how much AI systems trust Reddit itself?
That experiment may only be beginning.
Related NetContentSEO research
Our recent test:
Does ChatGPT Still Prefer Reddit? We’re Testing It Ourselves