Companies Manipulate Reddit to Influence ChatGPT: AEO, the New SEO Aiming to Pollute Chatbot Responses
The moderators of r/biohackers, one of Reddit's historic communities dedicated to supplements, longevity, and experimental pharmacology, have decided to ban new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapies (HRT), confining them to a weekly megathread. The decision does not pertain to the substance of these topics but rather how companies producing and selling them were using the forum: flooding it with content crafted to be harvested by chatbots and guide their responses.
Official Policy Update on Peptide & HRT Content (PLEASE READ) by u/aldus-auden-odess in Biohackers
This practice already has a name in digital marketing circles: AEO, which stands for AI-engine optimization, aimed at optimizing for artificial intelligence engines. It is the evolution of the more well-known SEO: instead of climbing Google search rankings, the goal is to infiltrate the material that large language models gather to construct their responses.
Reddit is an ideal target, as it is currently one of the most cited sources by tools like ChatGPT and Google AI research.
How to Manipulate a Community
One of the moderators recounted the dynamics to 404 Media. The most insidious techniques go beyond the old practice of product placement in comments. Some agencies reverse-engineer the question patterns that models tend to favor, then publish innocuous and highly engaging threads: deliberately vague, clickbait questions like “Is the hype around vitamin D really justified?” The discussion takes off, is rewarded by algorithms, and at that point, brands insert their mentions in just the right spots, with an apparently organic tone. Apparently, indeed.
Complicating moderators' work is the quality of the accounts being used. These are not just newly created profiles meant to spam; they are “warm” accounts with credible posting histories that are not solely promotional, sometimes managed by real people paid to post. Recognizing them, the moderator explains, has become more of an exercise in intuition than in rules, with a real risk of hitting those who are posting in good faith. When asked about the issue, Reddit stated that it relies on internal security teams and automated tools to identify and remove this type of content on a large scale.
The Physical Risk and the Emptying Network
For r/biohackers, the stakes are not just about the quality of conversation. Peptides and hormone therapies largely operate in a gray market that is poorly regulated, filled with a mix of serious companies and more unscrupulous entities whose products can be unsafe. The moderators' fear is clear: that an unreliable company promotes its compound, someone takes it, and suffers real harm, in a context where even teenagers ask how to gain a few centimeters in height.
The backdrop to all this is Reddit’s agreements that have transformed its content into a raw material for AI, granting its use to Google and OpenAI in exchange for million-dollar compensation. That same content, once it became one of the privileged sources for chatbots, has also turned into a terrain worth manipulating.
Beyond the technical countermeasures, the words of the moderators reveal a particularly bitter observation. "There’s this sadness I feel seeing one of the places on the internet that was so human erode and become bogged down with artificial content generated by AI," one of them recounted. "I find it deeply depressing."