AI search isn't pulling answers from your carefully SEO'd blog posts.
It's citing Reddit threads where real people solve real problems.
Reddit made that official: launching tools for brands to tap those conversations, suing competitors who scrape them, and admitting its user numbers might not mean what you think they mean.
Five stories that explain where discovery actually happens now ⬇
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🔥 What's Hot on Reddit?
🔍 Reddit Launches "Community Intelligence" Tools to Mine 22 Billion Conversations: Platform opens access to conversations across 100,000+ communities for marketing insights, letting brands track what people say to each other about problems instead of just brand mentions. Early tests show 19% higher CTR when ads include real community voices. Publicis testing for Hershey and Comcast, using it for campaign planning and competitive intelligence. The shift: brands finally get scalable access to authentic decision-making conversations that actually drive purchases.
See the community listening playbook📊 AI Trusts Institutions for Health Info While People Trust Reddit—Except AI Won't Cite It: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity pull 30.7% of health citations from Mayo Clinic and Healthline, 22.9% from academic sources, 18% from CDC and government sites. Reddit dominates AI citations across every other industry but doesn't crack top 20 for health queries despite being where people actually seek peer health advice. Meanwhile CDC credibility dropped from 88% (2020) to 62% (2025), and 41% of adults 18-34 ignore doctor's advice for friends' recommendations. AI cites the authorities people stopped trusting.
See the trust gap data🚨 Reddit's "116 Million Daily Users" Includes Anyone Who Opened a Page Once—Logged In or Not: Company counts both authenticated users (50M) and logged-out traffic (66M) as "daily active uniques," relying on deprecated Google AMP framework and dynamic IPs that count bots multiple times. Meta added 250M logged-in users same period—42x Reddit's actual growth. Even Meta's Threads (150M daily actives) has 3x Reddit's logged-in base. Reddit's own risk disclosure warns: "Our DAUq metric is not directly comparable quarter over quarter" and may be "significantly overstated." Read the full analysis
⚖️ SerpAPI Calls Reddit Lawsuit a "Threat to the Free and Open Web" After Scraping Claims: Reddit sued SerpAPI, Perplexity, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy for scraping content from Google Search results "at industrial scale" and hiding identities to bypass restrictions. Reddit claims it set a "trap" for Perplexity to prove scraping, seeks financial damages and usage ban. SerpAPI response: "Public search data should be accessible"—backed by First Amendment, calling Reddit's move an attack on data accessibility. Context: Reddit licenses data to OpenAI and Google while suing competitors doing similar extraction.
See SerpAPI's full defense📅 Reddit Hosts Webinar on AI Search Visibility as Conversational Discovery Replaces Keywords: Platform acknowledging the shift—AI-driven search now pulls answers from Reddit threads instead of traditional SEO content, making brand participation in subreddit discussions critical for discovery. Webinar covers how conversations (not keywords) shape audience encounter with brands and why missing from Reddit threads means invisible in AI-generated answers. Timing signals platform's push to position itself as essential AI training ground after licensing deals with OpenAI and Google. The shift: brands optimizing for Google while actual discovery happens in ChatGPT citing Reddit threads they're not part of.
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