Unpacking Reddit’s disproportionate influence

Its reach may surprise you.

Everyone’s heard of Reddit, whether from the meme stock squeezing triggered by the subreddit r/wallstreetbets or from its checkered past that included “jailbait” and “creepshot” among other toxic and dangerous subreddit communities.

Some investment professionals continue to associate Reddit with fringe activity. But it would be a mistake today to underestimate the role the social network plays in informing investment-related information online.

Those who think Reddit is no part of their experience may want to think again.

Let’s break it down.

Reddit elevated in search results

The discussions that take place on Reddit offer an authenticity that’s increasingly valued as more AI-written, SEO-optimized content is added to the web. At all times, Google needs to protect the value of the search results it serves. That’s what led the search engine in 2023 to enter into an agreement giving Google continuous access to the Reddit data API, including training on it for AI. You may have noticed Reddit discussions regularly ranking in the top five results of searches you run.

Once searchers click on the Reddit result, they tend to stay on the platform for a while. Google notes the extended visit duration as a positive signal, which assures it will continue to prioritize the result. Reddit today is one of the top five sites receiving Google traffic, resulting in 3.8 billion visits in June, according to SimilarWeb.com.

Reddit valued as a source of how people talk

Reddit’s more than 20 years of user-generated content—"human thought, argument, advice, humor and support” in question and answer exchanges similar to chat conversations—offers unique value to AI firms. The firm has data licensing contracts with multiple companies, and many are scraping and training on the data without permission, which is the subject of ongoing litigation.

Important to note: Reddit posts are created by a user base that’s much different from the general population, including the average investors. They skew young, male, higher income, more educated, with a preference for higher-risk, shorter-term investments.

Reddit for investment-related information

For professionals seeking to understand investors (especially younger), what’s posted to the subreddits /stocks /investing /personalfinance provide a wealth of insights.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia published data in March 2025 showing the overall use of Reddit for financial information compared to other platforms.

Younger investors consider Reddit to be the most trusted for financial information, according to a Forbes Advisor survey two years ago—what seems like a lifetime ago given the breadth of change in information discovery online.

Reddit as a gauge of sentiment

Also in 2023, Brunswick Group reported that institutional investors consider Reddit a valuable source.

A majority (58%) of investors who were familiar with Reddit had made investment decisions based on information from the platform, with half saying they expected to increase their use. The Robinhood Snacks newsletter ranked #1 as the newsletter the survey respondents most subscribed to.

Reddit for financial advisors

There isn’t a lot known about financial advisors’ recent business use of Reddit. Putnam’s social media research found as much as 31% of advisors said they used it in 2021, a number that dropped to 8% by 2022.

There is a subreddit that was created in 2014 for CFPs. With 38,000 members, the r/CFP subreddit ranks in the top 4% in size of all subreddits. Discussions there cover the gamut from practice management to products to professional development. Frustration over posts from students is a common theme, but overall the subreddit can be a valuable source to check on what’s on others’ minds—especially when using the filters to sort by Best, Hot or Rising.

The subreddit gives members the ability to post information or express opinions—which will be able to be read in real-time or to be discovered—whether via Reddit or Google search—months and years later.

The potential for shenanigans

All of the above take place in an explicit way. What’s not in plain sight are the ways in which Reddit posts serve as sources for investment-related information served up by generative AI.

Who’s turning to AI for financial advice? As few as one out of five boomers and as many as three out of four Gen Z investors, according to Betterment’s survey released last month.

In our work we repeatedly see assertions made by AI—only to click on citations provided to reveal a lone Reddit post.

This is worth taking a beat.

There is a fundamental difference between a Reddit post serving as a source and other potential sources.

Consider the controls in place—the hiring of credentialed journalists, editorial review and fact-checking—in traditional media. Not to mention the implied accountability for accuracy, copyright protection and decency.

Little of that exists in social media. On most major platforms, “transparent identity” is intended to serve as editorial control. Social posters have identities and reputations against which the information they share can be vetted. Presumably, that helps assure they are on their best behavior. And, the newer verification systems on LinkedIn and X are meant to bolster accountability.

On Reddit, users post under pseudonyms. They maintain consistent usernames and build their reputations through “karma” scores designed to encourage authentic engagement. Users can build trust and credibility over time—as moderated by the Reddit community using an upvote/downvote system to evaluate their posting—while maintaining anonymity.

The bottomline: Unvetted Reddit content posted anonymously by “voices” that may or may not have either professional credentials or a willingness to take personal responsibility can serve as the basis for answers to questions posed in AI search. This is particularly germane where the investment subreddits are believed to offer highly specialized comments that can’t be found elsewhere.

People say things to get quoted. That’s been going on for a while. The moderation provided by the Redditors—and remember that AI takes note of the up and down votes—can be more about community support or bias than factual accuracy.

But to what extent is it possible for a person or brand to plant something in Reddit with the express intention of influencing AI results?

An experiment by the University of Zurich has tested the first part of the question. They posted 1,7000 AI-generated comments to subreddits that proved to be six times more persuasive than human comments. Neither users or moderators detected the attempt to manipulate. When the experiment was exposed, Reddit banned them from the platform and refined their detection tool.

Unfortunately, the scope of the study didn’t include whether those responses made their way into the search engines and training datasets.

Back to the real world, our guess would be that some of that—the intentional planting of content for the purpose of being surfaced in AI responses—is taking place today, with more to come.

We’re going to wrap this post with a statement of fact: Never has it been more important to “consider the source.”

We like Reddit as yet another view into a world we’re interested in. We’re enthusiastic about AI search and the time savings it offers by producing synthesized responses based on web citations we might not otherwise have found ourselves.

Even so and however, we remind ourselves that it’s important to give back some of that productivity gain by taking the time to check out the sources that the responses are based on.

Reddit posts have individual value and seeing upvote support adds weight to the comment, but there’s peril in extrapolating much more from that.

We’re lining up our Q&As for Finfluential—who do you think we should profile? Send us an email.