Reddit Is Cracking Down on AI Marketing Slop With Its Own AI

Reddit Inc. is battling a new kind of spam: stealth marketing content created by brands that want to get mentioned by popular artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

OpenAI and Alphabet Inc., whose AI tools formulate responses and recommendations by drawing on vast amounts of internet information, have content deals with Reddit to pull from the site’s forums. Reddit is considered a trustworthy source where people share their unfiltered perspectives about various topics, making it one of the most common sources cited by AI chatbots, according to company executives and third-party studies.

That has also made the discussion forums a prime target for marketers looking to plant posts and comments that could get repeated by chatbots as genuine opinion.

Reddit is using AI to get ahead of these stealth marketing tactics. It announced Monday that improved automated systems caught 25,000 “spammy posts and comments” a day during the first quarter, reducing exposure for users by 20% over the same period one year ago. The company attributed the growth in spam it detected to its tools becoming more effective, rather than a meaningful increase in spam on the platform overall.

“We look at signals right when an account is created to stop suspicious actors before they ever get the chance to post,” Reddit said Monday in a blog post. The social media site is using large language models “to catch the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype that older systems once missed.”

The move highlights the nascent but growing practice of generative engine optimization, or GEO. The term, which evolved from “search engine optimization,” has been gaining traction in the marketing industry as brands vie for online attention from consumers turning more than ever to chatbots for information. Venture capitalists are paying attention, too, as they invest in AI-focused marketing firms like Profound, which saw its valuation top $1 billion after a February funding round.

GEO tactics are still evolving, but a recent study by Cornell Tech researchers found that it’s possible for user-generated content to manipulate results of AI research tools.

Reddit’s crackdown has already had an impact on marketers like Shanzila Ahmed, whose startup ReachLLM works with brands to boost their citations in AI responses by creating content on the social media site, among other techniques. She said her agency has had success getting posts cited by ChatGPT — some within a day of creation — but also said that some of the same posts have already been taken down by Reddit.

The cat-and-mouse game between Reddit and marketers will likely continue as they find ways to outmaneuver each other while the technology evolves. Reddit, for its part, relies heavily on its user community to remove content that violates its rules. Community moderators were responsible for more than 52% of post and comment removals from July 2025 to December 2025, Reddit said.

Ahmed said becoming a community moderator by creating new, topic-specific channels known as “subreddits,” has helped some of her customers in niche industries get cited by AI. But she acknowledged the increased risk of account suspensions as Reddit ramps up moderation around bots and spam.

“That is just something that we have to work around,” she said. “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.”