It didn’t take a long time for people to figure out how to game Google, and it’s been a whack-a-mole with Google vs. the Search Engine Optimizers ever since.
It turns out Reddit is being strategically used to pins on the well for AI, with questions and subreddit threads being placed (and silently spammed) to train AI to produce certain results leading users to commercial products and services. And apparently it’s not hard. As few as a couple of “appropriate” answers to an “innocently” placed question on Reddit can lead to AI ingesting the information and spitting it back out to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of users:
I have been there and done this. The search engines for GEO and SEO are discounting sales pitches on Reddit, they are discounted in value. If you get too spammy on Reddit that actually is a negative with ChatGPT and Gemini.
You can hurt your sales by leaning on Reddit. Spam is not citationable.
Marketers who are not keeping up still believe Reddit is a backdoor to GEO.
They post an innocent question. Then other “innocents” come in and answer the question, often with a specific remedy - as is common on Reddit. It is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, and while the monitors try, given the volumes they deal with I suspect they often fail, and the “intended answer” works its way into the dataset.
This is very different from the early SEO tactics of rearranging words, repeating important phrases, or even (as in one case I read about) inviting people to give negative reviews, because every “hit”, positive or negative, boosted the algorithm. (Google finally and belated put a stop to that.)
This is about providing actual training material, albeit poisoned from the start.
Yes this is doable but completely without the product. No picture, no mention. Nada. Just a discussion in broad terms.
Then you have to keep the discussion going. GEO looks for a constant thread with you in it. Your link on your profile to the product gets a worthless tiny bit of juice. The catch is the content has to be recent. Meaning you can drop your question at one point and a month later GEO does not care, if it ever did. The catch is if you keep it up you are running afoul of spamming…or you are talking about theory only.