Audit: Reddit AI search favors formal, highly upvoted comments
A preprint audit by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers traced 30,000 Reddit AI search answers back through 14.68 million comments across 20 advice subreddits. Comments one standard deviation more formal had 49% higher odds of being selected, while personal-experience language lowered the odds to 0.789; first-person words like “I” and “my” fell from 3.3% of quoted comments to 0.06% of final answers, per the study, reported by Search Engine Journal. The study has not been peer reviewed.
Why it matters: The audit suggests Reddit's own AI search rewards formal, already-popular phrasing and strips out first-person language, a selection bias distinct from how outside engines like ChatGPT and Google cite Reddit.
The record: Reddit
Posted to the wire September 17, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.