Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search
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Reddit<br>Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search
Jason Koebler
Jun 3, 2026<br>at 10:29 AM
Peptide companies have been doing AI-engine optimization by spamming the biohackers subreddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google.
Image: Reddit
🖥️<br>404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Sign up to support our work and for free access to this article. Learn why we require this here.
The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape—in this case, a popular Reddit community.<br>In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. r/Biohackers is a long-running subreddit about using supplements, experimental pharmacology, and other longevity or fitness-adjacent themes; peptides and HRT have become a wildly popular topic of discussion on the subreddit, especially as companies try to market them off-label or as grey-market compounds.<br>“As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality,” a post by the moderators read.
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