The next time you ask an AI what product to buy, which agency to hire, or which software platform actually works, pay attention to where the answer comes from. Increasingly, it does not come from the vendor’s own website. It comes from a stranger’s Reddit comment written eighteen months ago, upvoted 847 times by people who tried the thing themselves.
This is not an accident. It’s architecture.
The Reddit Effect
The financial architecture behind Reddit’s presence in AI answers became public in early 2024. Google signed an initial licensing…

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