Fake Reviews Aren’t for People Anymore. They’re for the Models.
Reddit is being flooded with AI-generated posts and reviews. According to a recent MediaPost piece, brands are planting them there because ChatGPT and Google’s AI treat Reddit as a trusted source of real human opinion. The target isn’t a reader. It’s an algorithm looking for something to cite.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the SEO playbook from the 2000s, one layer up.
Back then, ranking on Google was something you gamed: keyword stuffing, invisible text, link farms, thousands of dodgy backlinks. It worked, for a while. Then Google shipped Panda and Penguin, and most of those tactics stopped working overnight. Sites built on tricks collapsed. Sites built on genuinely useful content held steady.
We’re watching the same cycle repeat, with forums instead of backlinks. The models now read Reddit as ground truth, so that’s where the fake signal gets planted. And the platforms are already fighting back. Reddit is blocking 23 million spam views a day, removing close to 2 million fake votes daily, and catching around 25,000 spammy posts every day. The enforcement window that took Google years is now measured in seconds.
The reason this is happening is simple: search has moved into the answer box. Zero-click queries rose from 56% to 69% in under a year, and news sites lost 600 million monthly visits in the process. Being findable now means being cited, and brands are scrambling to work out how.
The lesson from the SEO era still applies: astroturfing is the wrong answer to the right question. It works until the platform catches it, and platforms are catching it in seconds now. You’re building your visibility on someone else’s moderation policy.
The better question is the one Panda and Penguin eventually forced everyone to ask: why would an AI cite you at all? Usually because the information about your product is clear, structured and genuinely useful, not because you gamed a forum.
Keyword stuffing didn’t survive. Fake reviews won’t either. The brands that win the citation race will be the ones the models actually understand, not the ones spamming Reddit.