Reddit против AI-SEO-спама: боты под видом пользователей рекламируют бренды

Brands have begun using AI tools on a large scale to embed covert advertising in Reddit threads: automatically created accounts post plausible personal recommendations, disguising paid content as advice from ordinary users. The Verge has documented a new wave of AI-SEO spam on the platform.

How the promotion scheme works

The scheme operates in several steps: an account resembling an ordinary community member is created, finds a relevant thread — and inserts a product recommendation disguised as personal experience. In a skincare subreddit, a user asked a question about hypochlorous acid sprays — a popular acne treatment. Among dozens of responses, a comment appeared from the account Primary-Taro4254.

"I personally haven't tried [that brand], so I can't fully compare, sorry.

But I've used a similar hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs and I really liked it," wrote Primary-Taro4254, as documented by The Verge.

The account looked sufficiently organic and generously shared "sincere" skincare details. This very pattern — "haven't tried that brand, but this one is great" — is typical of AI-generated marketing content.

• The account Primary-Taro4254 was created to promote the Honeydew Labs brand
• Reddit threads regularly appear at the top of Google and Yandex search results
• AI search engines — Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overview — use Reddit as a source of "real" advice
• Language models allow generating such comments at industrial scale

Why Reddit became the main target of AI spam

Reddit is valued precisely for its "unpolished" quality: users trust threads more than marketplace reviews, because they expect genuine voices without PR processing. This is exactly what makes the platform an attractive target for brands that want to promote themselves organically — without buying ads.

The situation is aggravated by Reddit's role in the AI search ecosystem. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI assistants actively cite Reddit threads when answering user questions. When a person asks for skincare advice, an AI system may produce exactly such a "recommendation" — not knowing that it is backed by a marketing campaign.

Traditional moderation tools — user reports, voting, manual review — cannot keep pace with the speed of generation. A single marketer with access to a language model is capable of creating dozens of accounts and hundreds of plausible comments per day.

How AI spam differs from classic spam

Old Reddit spam included obvious advertising links or blatant rule violations that moderators would notice quickly. The new AI spam is fundamentally different: it is written in conversational language, contains no suspicious links, and technically does not violate the platform's rules.

According to The Verge, Reddit is aware of the threat and is working on tools to detect coordinated marketing campaigns. Exact data on the scale — how many accounts have been blocked, how many AI comments removed — the company does not disclose.

The AI-SEO promotion industry is growing in parallel with the availability of language models. Where such campaigns previously required content farms with cheap labor, today a single specialist with a GPT subscription or equivalent is sufficient.

What this means

AI-SEO spam does not attack the search function — it attacks the very trust in the platform: people come to Reddit specifically for advice from real people, not algorithms. If Reddit cannot find a reliable way to separate AI-generated content from organic content, its value — both for users and for the AI search engines that rely on it — will steadily decline.