Marketers Are Hoping Brand Mentions on Reddit Will Influence Chatbots

Mia Sato, the Verge: 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. Marketers and search optimization specialists have been doing this kind of thing for years but, as Sato explains, their strategies have become more surreptitious in recent years. Because they are no longer as singularly focused as juicing the ranking position of a client’s website in search results, they no longer need to include links or other common tells of search marketing spam. They merely…