South Africa, June 18 -- For years, Reddit occupied an awkward corner of the marketing map: too chaotic to manage, too niche to justify a serious budget, too hostile to tolerate branded content. Most marketing teams treated it as a place to monitor occasionally and otherwise avoid. That instinct is now a liability.

Reddit is quietly becoming one of the most consequential inputs into how consumers discover and evaluate brands in the AI era. Understanding why requires a small detour into how large language models actually work.

How AI learned to think like Reddit The systems powering ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and the AI Overviews now embedded at the top of search results were trained on vast amounts of publicly available text. Reddit, with...