AI turned 'I tried this and liked it' into Reddit's new spam format

A user named Primary-Taro4254 started posting thoughtful, credentialed comparisons of hypochlorous acid sprays (an over-the-counter skin-calming product often used for acne and irritation) in r/SkincareAddiction, a large skincare-advice community on Reddit, repeatedly recommending Honeydew Labs by name. The posts read like community tips from a careful user. A PSA thread on May 11, 2026 flagged the marketing bot pattern, and the same account had made a near-identical pitch in r/EuroSkincare. A moderator announced a new auto-filter for the brand. The case is a clean specimen of a new spam shape: AI-assisted product endorsements that mimic a regular user's "I tried this and liked it" post, planted at scale into niche communities where trust is high.

The reason this works now, and did not two years ago, is that Reddit mentions have become SEO gold in the AI-search era. Semrush data compiled for The Verge shows Reddit was the most-cited domain in May 2026 across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Mode, ahead of news publishers, scholarly repositories, and Wikipedia. The same data found Google inserting AI Overviews much more frequently into queries with commercial intent than a year earlier. AEO and GEO (answer and generative engine optimization) have replaced backlinks as the goal: a mention in a Reddit thread can now get a brand cited by a chatbot, even without a click.

AI tools collapsed the cost of writing plausible "I tried this" posts at scale. The value of a single Reddit mention went through the roof at the same time. The pattern shows up in food scanners, body scanners, and GLP-1 providers on weight-loss forums, hypochlorous acid on skincare subs, indie record labels pushing artists on music boards, and peptide clinics in longevity communities. 404 Media reported in June that biohacking subreddits are dealing with peptide promotional spam tied to LLM citation chasing, and Bloomberg covered Reddit's crackdown on "AI marketing slop" in July.

r/SkincareAddiction auto-bans brands and sock puppets and now auto-filters brand mentions; a recent thread that claimed to have "hijacked" the community to promote a Korean beauty brand on Google was removed. r/loseit moderators keep a "shit list" of brands suspected of covert promotion and auto-filter their mentions; the tell the moderator there flags most often is a post that ends with "I'm curious to know." r/indieheads moderators uncovered four suspected label-affiliated accounts in a single week and launched a label verification process that dozens of labels have signed up for.

Reddit is managing the problem with AI-based detection tools. Bloomberg's reporting covered the crackdown in July.

Google's on-record response points the other direction. Spokesperson Jennifer Kutz said Reddit "gets no special preference" in ranking, that Google keeps results "99% spam-free," and that user-generated content is evaluated for helpfulness versus low quality. The same Semrush dataset that shows Reddit dominating AI citations also shows Google pushing AI Overviews harder on commercial queries. The two positions can both be true and still leave volunteer moderators doing the work of pattern recognition that neither platform has automated.

The portable mental model for any reader in any community: check the poster's history, watch for cross-subreddit brand repetition, and treat "I noticed X credential" openers and "I'm curious to know" closers as tells. The Honeydew Labs case was caught because a user looked up Primary-Taro4254's posting history across subs. Without readers willing to do that work, the pattern keeps running.