In May 2026, Reddit was the website most often cited by four major AI search tools: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's Gemini, and Google's AI Mode. It beat out news sites, Wikipedia, and academic sources. The data was compiled for The Verge by Semrush, a company that tracks search engine data. The finding confirms what marketers have suspected for months: Reddit's user-written content has become a go-to source for AI tools that answer people's questions by pulling information from across the web. The Verge

The same data shows that Google now shows AI-generated summaries at the top of search results much more often for shopping-related searches, like product research and brand comparisons, compared with a year ago. For companies, showing up in those AI answers increasingly depends on showing up in the Reddit conversations those answers pull from. The Verge

The incentive this creates is already producing predictable results. A Reddit user named Primary-Taro4254 posted promotional messages praising a company called Honeydew Labs and its hypochlorous acid spray across multiple Reddit skincare communities, including in discussions about unrelated products. The posts claimed the product uses a 0.02% concentration and is accepted by the National Eczema Association. A member of r/SkincareAddiction, a skincare community with more than one million weekly visitors, posted a warning telling others to "be aware of honeydew labs hypochlorous acid/ marketing bots." A moderator then announced action against Primary-Taro4254 and said all Honeydew Labs posts would be flagged for review. Honeydew Labs did not respond to a request for comment, and Primary-Taro4254 did not respond to a Reddit message. The Verge

The Honeydew Labs case is one example of a broader pattern. Reddit matters to brands and marketers because AI chatbots cite it so frequently, as The Verge reports. That effect is strengthened by Reddit's own business deals: in February 2024, Reddit entered an agreement to give an unnamed large AI company access to its user-generated content for training AI models. The more Reddit content feeds AI tools, the more valuable it becomes for companies to manipulate that content. The Verge

There is a familiar pattern here. Years ago, people started adding the word "Reddit" to their Google searches because they trusted Reddit's real-user discussions more than websites that had been written to game search rankings — a behavior The Verge noted in 2023. That same year, The Verge reported that people were using ChatGPT to generate entire fake websites, and that Reddit communities were protesting data scraping by AI companies. A Verge feature called "The people who ruined the internet" argued that the practice of optimizing content for search engines had made the web less trustworthy. What is new now is that AI search tools bypass traditional search spam by citing Reddit instead, and that creates a new opportunity for the same kind of manipulation. The Verge The Verge The Verge

Reddit's own data suggests the platform is aware of the problem. In a July 2026 announcement titled "Keeping Reddit Real and Safe in the AI Era," the company reported a roughly 20% reduction in spam from January to March 2026 compared with the previous three months, followed by an additional 10–15% drop in the period after that. Reddit's Transparency Report for July to December 2025 states that volunteer community moderators handled 52.7% of post and comment removals, while company staff handled 44.7%. The platform's rules prohibit content manipulation and require users to participate honestly in communities, explicitly banning spam and disruptive behavior. Reddit Reddit Reddit

The moderation burden is worth noting. More than half of all content removals still depend on unpaid volunteers. As the commercial value of being cited on Reddit rises, the work required to keep the platform trustworthy grows accordingly. The r/SkincareAddiction moderators caught one operation. The question is how many similar operations across thousands of communities go undetected, and whether Reddit's automated spam tools can keep up with the incentive it has helped create.

This is the recurring tension of the web: each new layer that routes around manipulation becomes, in turn, the next thing to manipulate. Google's AI tools pulling from Reddit threads is a vote of confidence in the platform's content. That vote of confidence is also an invitation.