GoKawiilEarlier this year, a Reddit user had asked members of a skincare-focused subreddit if anyone had tried a specific hypochlorous acid spray, a product often used for acne. There were dozens of responses; one from a user named Primary-Taro4254 seemed innocuous enough, at least at first.
“I haven’t personally tried [that brand] so I can’t fully compare, sorry,” they commented. “But I have been using a similar hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs and I’ve honestly really liked it.”
Primary-Taro4254 helpfully shared their experience using the spray to calm their skin’s redness and irritation, and even threw in some of Honeydew Labs’ credentials: “One thing I noticed when comparing products is that Honeydew Labs uses a 0.02% hypochlorous acid concentration and it’s also accepted by the National Eczema Association, which made me feel a bit more confident trying it on sensitive skin.”
But a closer look at Primary-Taro4254’s Reddit profile revealed that they apparently really, really liked the Honeydew Labs hypochlorous acid spray. It wasn’t just the one thread where they were praising the product — they had posted similar messages on threads about unrelated products as well as in other skincare-related subreddits. Was Primary-Taro4254 working for Honeydew Labs? Was it a marketing firm’s inartful promotional strategy? Was there a person behind it at all, or was it an automated spammer? Before long, a member of r/SkincareAddiction — a popular subreddit with more than 1 million weekly visitors — had caught on, telling others to “be aware of honeydew labs hypochlorous acid/ marketing bots.” Soon after, a moderator announced they had taken action on Primary-Taro4254 and would now automatically filter out Honeydew Labs posts for moderator review.
(Honeydew Labs didn’t respond to a request for comment. Primary-Taro4254 didn’t respond to a message sent via Reddit.)
It’s hard to overstate how central Reddit has become to how billions of people experience the web over the last several years. It has gone from a constellation of niche communities with a sometimes cantankerous user base to becoming perhaps the most urgently important website on the internet. First, users began adding “reddit” to the end of queries in order to wade through results littered with search engine optimization (SEO) junk, and in turn Google began linking to the site prominently. Now, Reddit has become significant to brands and marketers for another reason: AI chatbots love to cite it.
According to data compiled for The Verge by Semrush, an SEO company owned by Adobe, Reddit was the most-cited domain in May by AI tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini and AI Mode — more than any news publisher, repositories of scholarly articles, and even Wikipedia. AI responses are also encroaching into the online shopping journey: Semrush also found that compared to a year ago, Google is inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into search queries with commercial intent, like when shoppers are doing research on products or comparing brands.
When web traffic is funneled through LLMs instead of a traditional search results page, as Google has been doing, being cited by a chatbot becomes ever more important. Now, a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI. In an effort to try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers, marketers have descended upon Reddit, a pseudo-anonymous platform that users have come to associate with authenticity and unfiltered, truthful opinions.
They will have to get past the moderators first.
Before Maya Adivi became one of r/SkincareAddiction’s moderators, she was an active user, immediately drawn to the community’s attention to the science underpinning the beauty industry: Instead of general, simple questions like “What should I do for acne?”, users took a more rigorous approach, discussing and explaining new studies being published simply because they were passionate about the topic. Moderating for spam and promotional content has always been part of the job, Adivi says, but these days even a long, detailed breakdown of a study might be viewed with suspicion.
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