For years there has been one reliable trick for getting an honest answer out of the internet: type your question into the search box and add the word "reddit". Which cheap moisturiser works. Whether the laptop runs hot. What the mechanic is actually describing. The word was a filter — it skipped the marketing and went straight to the sound of a real person, with no obvious stake, saying what they thought.
That trick is now compromised, and it is worth understanding exactly how, because the same corruption reaches the AI assistants many people have switched to instead.
The mechanics are simple. AI models have the same problem you do: marketing copy is worthless, because every product calls itself excellent. What a model wants, when asked for a recommendation, is testimony — the unglamorous verdict of someone who used the thing. The largest supply of testimony on the open internet, sorted by topic and ranked by community approval, is Reddit. So forum posts have become the evidence base for chatbot advice and for the AI summaries that now sit on top of search results.
And the moment authenticity became valuable, it became worth counterfeiting. The industry that once gamed Google's rankings has retooled to game the chatbot's paragraph instead: plant enough seemingly organic praise in the right forums and you are not optimising a web page, you are editing the advice millions of people receive from an assistant they believe is neutral. Researchers have shown that even small planted snippets of text can steer a model's later answers. This is no longer hypothetical: on the skincare forum r/SkincareAddiction, moderators publicly warned members about accounts pushing one particular spray with the brand-specific enthusiasm real users rarely sustain.
The hard part is that this forgery is made of the same material as the real thing. A fake satisfied customer reads exactly like a genuine one — that is the job. Which is why the useful tells are behavioural, not textual, and why a careful reader in 2026 checks them: click the account. A real person has a history that wanders — sport, complaints, an argument about kettles three years ago. An account that exists mainly to praise one product, or that appeared recently and posts in polished paragraphs, is advertising until proven otherwise. Weigh the thread, not the comment: one glowing verdict is noise, a spread of mixed experiences with specific gripes is signal. Trust old threads a little more than fresh ones — yesterday's internet was gamed by amateurs. And treat moderator notes and locked megathreads as what they are: the volunteers who run these communities telling you where the bodies are buried.
Above all, carry the scepticism across to the assistants. When a chatbot recommends a product and cites "what users say", some of those users may have been purchased. The machine cannot yet tell the difference. Neither, always, can you — but unlike the machine, you can check the account history. For now, that is the edge worth keeping.
