Why Reddit Wins the Internet (Today)

Reddit no longer exists on the fringes. It's gone mainstream, baby.

Alive for over 20 years, the past 3 years have seen LLMs and Search Engines (SEs) full of Reddit-cited answers.

Reddit used to be the place you'd lose a Sunday afternoon, diving into niche subreddits and reading long, fruitless arguments between strangers. They called it "the front page of the Internet" (honestly I think it was more like the basement).

But the rise of LLMs and AI overviews has seen a drastic change to Reddit's place online.

Their traffic ballooned 394% between '23 and '26, with Daily Average Users (DAUs) doubling from 60m to 120m since '21.

I think two of the reasons for the rise of Reddit in results are its data deal with Google and Sam Altman's equity stake.

Google signed a ~$60M/year licensing deal with Reddit in Feb '24, then OpenAI signed its own deal in May '24. Reddit is contractually wired into both the dominant search engine and the dominant LLM.

And Sam Altman has been one of the largest individual investors in Reddit since 2014. He clearly benefits financially every time OpenAI cites Reddit in an answer. Plus, he likely has tons of sway in using Reddit for training.

Why has Reddit become so popular? It’s the proxy for 'human proof points' in an age where LLMs recommend where we go, what we buy and how we think.

Reddit answers are a helpful counter balance to LLM recs: "See, this is what real people think.”

The uncomfortable truth is that Reddit is valuable precisely because it's (mostly) human. That value is creating the exact incentive to flood it with bots and AI-generated comments. Every SEO agency has already figured out the move.

If LLMs cite Reddit, seed Reddit with your brand. Astroturfing services are already running. This is the Penguin-era link farm playbook, redone for 2026.

IMHO, Reddit citations are about to drop off a cliff as marketers manipulate threads for their own gain. If your brand is favourably mentioned on Reddit, then it's likely to be favourably mentioned in LLMs.

Hence, the incentive for manipulation.

If you recognise the pattern from my previous post, you're correct. It's straight out of the Black Hat era playbook.

Astro-turfing, when brands secretly seed conversations about themselves to influence buyer behaviour on Reddit, is alive and well.

Bots and AI-generated comments in Reddit are real, not theoretical, and definitely do influence human opinion.

In 2025, researchers from the University of Zurich posted over 1,700 comments on the /changemyview subreddit to test how persuasive LLMs could be in real conversations.

Reddit threatened legal action, so they never published their findings. Regardless, it's a clear example of the ease of orchestrating a manipulative campaign on Reddit in the first place.

Many brands and agencies stuff Reddit with favourable mentions or preferred narratives. This correlates with LLMs already reducing Reddit citations. One study indicated a 50% drop from Oct '25 to Jan '26.

The landscape is different, but the game is the same.

Don't astro-turf.

The winning businesses of the GEO era won't be those jumping on the Black Hat bandwagon. It'll be those that truly invest in community, brand and product, creating genuine positive feedback.