It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Internet we know and love is dead. Or at least that it’s no longer a source of reliable information. The same Google search that once yielded one-click results now brings up an AI overview full of misinformation and dangerous inaccuracies. The worst part? Companies are cashing in on this confusion, and they’re using Reddit to skew the answers in their favor. AI bots are “cannibalizing” search as we know it, and the outlook is pretty scary.
The name for this move is as creepy as the practice itself. “Reddit sentiment optimization” is AI’s newest way of crowdsourcing content and repackaging it as facts by “listening” to social media like it’s the gospel truth.
This type of search isn’t even that new. Back in 2023, Google started prioritizing Reddit threads on search in an effort to fight spammy SEO posts and focus more on real peoples’ experiences. In a pre-AI universe, it made sense, even if the threads weren’t always the most reliable way of getting a succinct answer to a question.
But because Reddit has historically been big on moderation and low on spam, it felt like a good place to mine answers to common questions… until AI started doing that work. Though AI can often do an okay job of crowdsourcing answers, it also lacks the ability to parse tone, which Reddit posts tend to be heavy on. This is how we get the infamous “it’s okay to eat glue on your pizza” search result of 2024.
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Add to this the problem of laughably easy AI search manipulation, and you’ve got an increasingly unreliable online climate.
A recent report from 404 Media zeroed in on a specific subreddit that recently got flooded with sneaky advertisements from brands, a growing problem in the once-beloved community space. Basically, once brands found out they could manipulate AI search to bring up results that pointed back to their product, things got very spammy on the platform.
On the r/biohacking channel, which revolves around (often dubious) ways to optimize health and fight aging, the AEO trend poses a special threat. Because HRT companies aimed at cis people have been making a killing, they’re using the subreddit to sneak in advertisements framed as advice and firsthand experience. In response, the subreddit has banned conversation around peptides and HRT in the main thread.
This speaks to a broader concern among trans people who must face significant HRT access guardrails where their cis counterparts get sold access as a way to “hack” into a better body. But the danger is symptomatic of something even creepier: a mutation of the “dead internet theory” that reduces the internet to a series of bots talking to—and advertising to—each other. This is what journalist Aidan Walker terms the “c*ck internet theory.”
Reddit is currently at the top of this AEO food chain, with 99% of Chat GPT responses coming from individual threads on the site, per a 2025 study. This data mining is transforming what was once a thriving community into yet another space where people don’t want to be. The space has been training AIs for years, but Reddit’s current lack of moderation creates bigger problems for AI models that can’t easily distinguish fact from fiction. Or even fact from anecdote. Adding to this issue, you’ve got the fact that AI is learning so fast that Google searches are now pulling results that haven’t been on Reddit for longer than a single day.
While Reddit is far from the only space weakened by covert company-trained AI bots and ensloppification, it’s one of the last remaining authentic spaces we have in an increasingly cucked digital universe.
“We need an internet immune system,” one concerned commenter wrote on the initial r/biohacking thread that called out the problem.
Another Redditor noted that the AEO bot takeover is “removing the incentive for people to publish freely.”
Of course, there’s an even darker problem here if we cast an eye to the future. If this kind of sloppification continues, what can we expect to see in the channels that were once prized spaces of queer community exchange? Will we all just have to abandon ship and go to Discord?
There’s a problem there, too. According to Travis Tallent, queer former SVP of SEO at Brainlabs and founder of DayNova.ai, even though Discord is a great place for more private community discussions and “skews younger and more tech-savvy,” that’s also its biggest problem.
“If queer communities abandon Reddit for more private spaces like Discord,” he says, “we risk fragmenting the very thing that made those message boards valuable: accessibility. A teenager in rural Alabama doesn’t need an invite link. They need to be able to search, find someone who’s been where they are, and know they’re not alone. That’s what Reddit at its best has always been.”
What Tallent hopes for the future is a Reddit experience made up of human moderators who won’t put up with spammy threads and companies trying to game the system. “If a post feels off, report it or downvote it. Trust your instincts because astroturfing has a smell!” he encourages. Tallent also hopes we “show up for the people keeping your spaces safe.”
We can also get better at protecting certain “vulnerable” community conversations by opting for more anonymity. “Multiple accounts aren’t sketchy,” he says, “they’re a feature.”
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