AI+Automation (2026) — Reddit's hidden influence on AI brand recommendations

Summary:

This preprint from Anthony Lee of AI+Automation, a consultancy that sells AI and automation services, tests whether Reddit shapes which brands AI tools recommend, even when the tools don’t cite it. It also checks whether Reddit is treated differently in APIs and in the web chat interfaces most people use. Claude (Anthropic) is credited as a research contributor.

Method and sample. The author pulled 12,187 posts and 103,696 comments from 60 subreddits through Reddit’s API. Brand mentions were scored by upvotes, where they appeared (title, body, comment) and comment depth. The scores were then ranked against brand recommendations from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini across 50 product queries, each asked three times. The correlation analysis covers 12 consumer categories. A second test compared Reddit citations in 60 API calls (15 queries) with 100 web UI queries per platform, collected by browser automation in February 2026.

Key findings:
• Reddit brand rankings and AI brand rankings lined up fairly strongly, with a mean Spearman ρ of .554 across 12 consumer categories. All 12 were significant at p < .05, and 8 survived Bonferroni correction.
• Office and Workspace had the strongest link (ρ = .746). Tools and Home Improvement (.401) and Health and Wellness (.410) had the weakest. The Health and Wellness confidence interval includes zero.
• The link held under different weighting rules and after controlling for Google Trends and Wikipedia views. With brands extracted independently of the AI data, it dropped to ρ = .430, with 7 of 12 categories significant.
• APIs returned 0% Reddit citations on every platform. Web UIs cited Reddit in 44% of queries on Google AI Mode, 20% on Perplexity and 17% on ChatGPT.
• Opinion and comparison queries pulled in Reddit most often: 70.8% on Google AI Mode and 45.8% on Perplexity.
• Claude cited Reddit zero times in both channels, but it cited any source in only 19% of web UI queries.

Margin notes:
This is an unreviewed preprint from a consultancy that has a stake in GEO advice, and it is co-written with an AI model that is also one of the platforms tested. Because the study is observational, it shows correlation, not that Reddit caused the AI outputs. Posts from 2025 onward correlated about as well as older posts, which weakens the training-data explanation and suggests both sources may track the same market signals. The main brand list was built from the AI answers themselves. The API test used 15 SaaS queries, while the web UI test used 100 mixed queries, so that comparison isn’t fully controlled. The web UI data comes from one logged-in session per platform at a single point in time.