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As I’m sure is the case with many of you, about five or so years ago I got to a point where I almost never Googled anything directly if it involved some kind of rating or comparison. Instead I would tack on ‘Reddit’ to the end of all those searches.
For example, if I was looking for the best pizza place in Dubai, I would search ‘best pizza place in Dubai Reddit’.
The reason for this is that Google got clogged up with so many ads and annoying SEO junk. You search ‘best pizza in Dubai’ and 10 restaurants are advertising the initial search results.
Then you get to the first ‘real’ link and it’s a 50,000 word essay on pizzas in Dubai. “The best pizzas have been in Dubai for 1000s of years. It all started when pizza-carrying seafarers from the city of Tyre in the Phoenician empire…”
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Anyway, this does still work a lot but over the past couple of months, I started to feel like it’s getting worse.
Why would that be?
As noted when we talked to the Obsero team – who have an AI search intelligence platform – Reddit has become one of the main sources that AI uses. Google has responded to this by adding a ‘Forums’ tab in search as well.
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The resulting incentive structure here is obvious. If your brand looks good in Reddit and that causes it to rank well in AI search, then you are strongly motivated to spam Reddit into making you look good.
This came to mind again last week by accident. I Googled something related to white labels and a Reddit discussion came up about the ‘best white label for brokers in 2025’.
The person who started the thread has been banned by Reddit already, which is usually a sign of spam.
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The first comment was from someone recommending B2BROKER. This user hasn’t commented on any other threads on Reddit, which is also indicative of spam.
The next one was from someone seemingly selling PSP services, a sign that even on Reddit you can’t escape payments companies.
And the final comment was from someone called Artem, who works at Quadcode. To be fair, he wasn’t hiding that so I don’t think it’s so bad.
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But the bottom line is that whole thread appears to have been set up to game Google and AI search.
So then I moved to do another test, if you search ‘best forex broker UK Reddit’ – what comes up?
The first thread that shows up on Google is from r/Forex_Reddit. The post itself was set up by the moderators of the subreddit.
They also autoresponded to the post recommending Blackbull Markets. Not abnormal but definitely paid for promotion.
The rest of the thread is just an absolute dumpster fire. The first two comments also recommend Blackbull Markets. One of those users has been banned and the other has a hidden profile.
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A bunch of other users on the thread have been banned and most of the rest are clearly bots. Most of the commenters hide their feeds as well, although one appears to only comment on threads related to Indian porn and forex.
The only genuine user seems to be a guy who wants to sign up people to City Index because he’ll get a referral fee.
The above image is fairly representative of the calibre of conversation. Nonsensical, obviously fake, and presumably designed to dunk on peers. Who wouldn’t believe what bigblackcoke has to say about trading indices on XM?
Looking at the wider subreddit as a whole, it looks like they do these threads for multiple countries, with all the same users commenting the same, random NPC stuff. Clearly the goal is to spam both Google search and AI as well.
Will this get better?
When we spoke to Obsero, one of the company’s co-founders, Andy Francos, noted that brands should try to be genuine and add value on Reddit, not just spam it and try to game the system for better rankings in ChatGPT. I think Quadcode’s comment is an example of this, to give them credit.
But as I said to Andy, I know you all too well. And I know that you will all try to game the system.
Looks like I am going to have to find a new way to get the best pizza in Dubai. Maybe I’ll check out Trustpilot…
