• by Laurie Sullivan , July 6, 2026

An abundance of promotional material integrated into media that consumers cannot quickly recognize as advertising moved into Reddit, and the company is working effortlessly to remove it from its platform.

Marketers have always used some form of “stealth marketing content,” but as of mid-2026, AI-created stealth content has become a significant challenge for digital platforms. They do this now to get mentioned by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

In fact, the practice has become an internet standard to get the attention of consumers and for brands to land more often in citations within an AI query response.

Advanced AI tools help reduce user exposure to spam. Reddit has managed to reduce spam by 20%, ridding the platform of nearly 2 million fake votes daily, and reduced enforcement time on hateful or violent content from hours to under five seconds.

"We’ve been fending off bots for 21 years,' according to a Reddit post. "And before there was AI slop, there was, well, regular slop."

Reddit's goal is to limit the impact and exposure to bad content before it gets to the platform's community.

"Our most effective work happens before a post is ever seen by a human," Reddit's post described. 

Automation and AI have enabled Reddit to detect manipulated and spammy content through new signals and faster enforcement. The technology identifies signals when an account is created to stop suspicious actors before they ever get the chance to post.

For those that do, Reddit uses large language models (LLMs) to catch the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype that older systems once missed. 

In recent months, these updated automated systems have been working at a massive scale. Reddit announced blocking 23 million spam views per day before they ever reach a human user.

The company has caught about 25,000 new spammy posts and comments daily, reduced spam spam exposure for Reddit users by 20% from January through March 2026, compared with the prior three months and forced an additional 10% to 15% drop in overall spam account exposure.

Reddit also revoked nearly 2 million inauthentic votes per day over the last three months.

Fake reviews have become another problem. Companies have flooded Reddit, gaming the platform with AI-generated fake posts to manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI search results because both treat Reddit as a trusted community opinion, according to one publisher. But the posts are made to look like real user reviews--all in the name of citations in AI query results.

5W, an AI communications firm, released The State of AI Citations 2026 in May, but the study was conducted between August 2024 and April 2026. It tracked more than 680 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to determine how LLMs source information about brands.

Zero-click search rose from 56% of queries in 2024 to 69% by May 2025. News-site organic traffic fell by 600 million monthly visits in under a year. The buyer journey moved into the answer box, and most communications budgets have not adjusted, according to 5W data.