Reddit’s human premium
Al Search vs Organic Visibility - Otterly.ai
I’ve been even more fascinated by reddit since seeing this chart “AI Search vs Organic Visibility” chart from a recent study by Thomas Pelham at Otterly. This highlights that Reddit content surfaces over 50% of the time on AI search vs less than 5% on organic search.
Is this because Sam Altman is one of the largest shareholders in reddit or because it over indexes with content engineers love?
Maybe it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Independent forecasts show the global stock of high-quality public text will be fully consumed for LLM training over the next 18-36 months
As fresh human input dries up, Reddit’s verified conversations become the single largest differentiator in model performance.
In a recent FT interview Steve Huffman warns of ‘arms race’ to protect its devoted online communities from AI-generated content. According to the article Reddit is fast-tracking World ID (Sam Altman’s retina ID scanner) and similar checks to prove posters are real people while staying anonymous.
Opportunities for Marketers
Analyse long-tail referral logs to pinpoint which LLM answer boxes already drive traffic and via which subreddit keywords.
Think about every Reddit post as future training data: clear, contextual, human-verified; ban unlabeled synthetic replies.
Lock governance before scale - set rules on disclosure, moderation and IP licensing prior to boosting spend.
