Reddit’s problem has shifted from ordinary spam to marketing written for chatbots, where brands and agencies publish seemingly spontaneous recommendations intended for AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to present as authentic user opinions. Posts are written to imitate everyday conversations, with the real audience including AI systems searching the internet. Reddit improved its automated systems for detecting coordinated behavior, artificial interest and covert product promotion. During the first quarter of 2026, the platform identified around 25,000 spam posts and comments per day, while user exposure to such content fell by 20 percent compared with the same period of the previous year. The company attributes the increase in detected cases to more precise tools, not necessarily a greater volume of spam. Reddit’s value for this marketing approach is connected to its relationship with OpenAI and Alphabet, which have agreements giving their AI products access to platform content. This environment accelerated generative engine optimization (GEO), which seeks to ensure a company or product name appears in AI-generated responses. Research by Cornell Tech found that responses produced by AI research tools can be steered through carefully placed user-generated content. Shanzila Ahmed, founder of ReachLLM, works with brands seeking to increase mentions in chatbot responses.