How Brands Use Reddit to Poison AI Search
6/29/202642 min
This week, we're doing a deep dive into how marketing companies are poisoning AI search results by manipulating Reddit. You may remember when Google’s AI search results first launched, it recommended that people put glue on their pizza. Well that happened because it scraped a 10 year old Reddit comment. We’ve learned over the last year or so that this sort of thing can be done on purpose, and brands are taking advantage of it. There’s been the rise of AEO or GEO, which stands for AI Engine Optimization or Generative Engine Optimization. Basically this is trying to get mentions of your brand into web content that’s likely to be scraped by AI tools. It’s the new version of SEO and lots of marketers and companies are trying to do it.
The most reliable, easiest way to do this appears to be by putting brand mentions onto Reddit. Reddit’s volunteer mods have noticed an increase in bot accounts and entire sequencing efforts—where a post and its comments are all basically done as a stealth ad—intended to boost brands. I wrote an article about this a few weeks ago, about r/biohackers banning mentions of peptides, which were a popular promoted class of product. After we wrote that article, researchers from Cornell University reached out to me about a new study they had just done.
The research is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content,” which provides a mechanism for the ways reddit, wikipedia, and other sites that allow users to post are being attacked by brands doing AEO: "We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently," the study says.
We spoke to two of the researchers, Hal Triedman and Tingwei Zhang, about this problem and what, if anything can be done about it.
Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24245
Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/2uG8ohZHOD8
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJason Kebler· Host0:00
Is it really just that simple?
Hal Trydman· Guest0:02
Yeah.
Jason Kebler· Host0:03
Yes. [laughs] It really is just that simple.
Hal Trydman· Guest0:05
The way that you can attack these systems is usually so much dumber than you think it is.
Jason Kebler· Host0:10
[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast. As a reminder, 404 Media is a journalist-founded company made by humans, for humans, not AI. In order to keep doing this, we need the support of our subscribers. Subscribers get access to bonus articles, everything on our website, bonus podcast episodes and segments, and early access to interview episodes like this one. To subscribe, go to fourohfourmedia.co. I'm Jason Kebler, and this week I'm going to be doing a deep dive into how marketing companies are poisoning AI search results by manipulating Reddit. I've done a few articles about this lately. You might remember when Google's AI search results first launched, it recommended that people put glue on their pizza. Well, that happened because it scraped a ten-year-old Reddit comment by some guy named Fucksmith. We've learned over the last year or so that this sort of thing can be done on purpose, and brands are taking advantage of it. There's been the rise of AEO or GEO, which stands for AI engine optimization or generative engine optimization. Basically, this is brands trying to get mentions into web content that's likely to be scraped by AI tools. It's the new version of SEO, and lots of marketers and companies are trying to do it. We've even reported on some companies