Marketers Are Hoping Brand Mentions on Reddit Will Influence Chatbots ⇥ theverge.com

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 need to mention the brand name in a positive context — a lot — with the hope of influencing what A.I. search will regurgitate.

I have noticed this kind of thing on Wikipedia, too. According to a presentation given last year by NP Digital, the search optimization company run by Neil Patel, Wikipedia.com [sic] is the second most commonly cited domain in Google’s A.I. Overviews. In a different presentation, this one from December 2024, NP Digital “highly recommend[s]” treating Wikipedia as a marketing opportunity. I stumbled across a result of their work recently when I was reading the article for James Hoffmann. There are two mentions of Bellwether Coffee that seemed out of place and, when I checked the page’s revisions, saw that they had been made by an employee of NP Digital to promote Bellwether. The employee tried creating a page for the company, too, but it was deleted, but the company still has those critical brand name mentions on one of the world’s most visited web domains.

Sato interviewed Mike Moschella, director of analytics at marketing firm DKC, about the wisdom of the crowds at Reddit and Wikipedia:

“The starting point of all business analytics is this idea that you can have a better price, you have better service, or you can have better quality, but you can’t have all three,” Moschella says. “If you say [your company’s stock] is the best stock ever in the universe, you can issue that press release a million times, but WallStreetBets [the subreddit] isn’t going to buy it if the fundamentals don’t agree.” Reddit should force brands to be more “honest and authentic,” Moschella says — at least in an ideal world.

Remind me again: the users of which website succumbed to mass hysteria based on a conspiracy theory about mall video game retailer GameStop and, subsequently, applied the same formula to Bed, Bath & Beyond? Top minds, I tell you.