r/aeo: rules, karma requirements and posting culture
A small, young subreddit about getting brands cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. No published rules, plenty of tool builders, and rising suspicion of plugs.
aeo · Open on Reddit
- Members
- 9.7k
- Created
- 2024
- New posts a day
- 10
- Comments on a typical post
- 5
- New posts removed
- 13%
The short answer
r/aeo publishes nothing: no karma requirement, no account age rule, no rules page, no flair. About 87% of recent posts stayed up, and every removal in our sample came from Reddit's own filters, not a moderator. The feed is a mix of practitioners sharing tests and founders announcing visibility tools, and threads are small, with a median of four or five comments. Bring data or a specific question, because the room is tired of pitches.
Who posts here
Posts assume you already do SEO. Terms like citations, fan-out queries, entity signals, structured data and AI Overviews are used without explanation. Beginner questions, such as asking for the top tools, stay up, but they mostly attract agencies and tool makers recommending themselves instead of a patient answer.
- Founders of AI visibility trackers and audit tools looking for feedback and users.
- SEO consultants and agency staff adding AEO or GEO to what they sell.
- In-house marketers at software companies trying to work out whether any of this can be measured.
- A few people running real experiments and publishing the method.
Karma and account requirements
What it takes to get a post through in r/aeo.
| Karma | Not stated publicly. The subreddit has no rules page, sidebar text or AutoModerator message that mentions karma. |
|---|---|
| Account age | Not stated publicly. |
| Post flair | None. No post in our sample carried a flair. |
| Rules | None published. Reddit's sitewide rules and spam filters still apply, and those filters removed about 13% of recent posts. |
What you can post
| Post type | Subreddit setting | Share of recent posts |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Allowed | 61% |
| Link | Allowed | 20% |
| Image | Allowed | 18% |
| Video | Allowed | 1% |
| Poll | Allowed | 0% |
What happens to a new post
Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.
- Stayed up87%
- Removed by Reddit's filters13%
- Deleted by the author<1%
Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.
What happened when we posted here
We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.
- Stayed up
- 91%
- Removed by Reddit's filters
- 9%
- Removed by moderators
- 0%
- Period
- November 2025 to June 2026
The culture
r/aeo was created in 2024 and has just under 10,000 members. It covers answer engine optimization, also called GEO: how to get a brand mentioned or cited when someone asks an AI model for a recommendation. It sees around 10 posts a day, about 60% of them text.
Two kinds of post dominate. One is the founder post: here is the tracker, extension or plugin I built, tell me what you think. One identical tool pitch appeared six times in our sample and stayed up each time. The other is the measurement post, where someone reports what they saw across a set of prompts, crawler logs or AI Overview results and asks whether others see the same.
The fault line is trust. One member asked whether the subreddit itself is turning into a promotion tactic, with fake accounts asking for the best agency and other accounts answering with their own, in the hope that AI models cite the thread. A reply said the subreddit needs explicit rules and enforcement. A second argument runs underneath: whether AI visibility numbers mean anything when the same search cites different sites from one day to the next.
What lands
- First-party data with the method shown: several hundred AI Overview searches repeated over three days, a crawler log analysis, a teardown of competitors' ads.
- Honest caveats. A simulation study that said up front it was simulated got serious replies.
- Practical measurement questions, such as how to find the prompts where your site is being cited.
- Skeptical takes on the field's own advice, including whether AEO is just SEO with a new name.
What gets removed or ignored
- We saw no moderator removals in the sample, and there are no written rules to break.
- Reddit's own spam filters removed about 13% of posts. Reddit does not give a reason.
- Repeat promotional posts are not removed. The same tool pitch stayed up several times over.
The unwritten rules
- Disclose your stake. The replies that get taken seriously open with a line saying the writer builds a tool or runs an agency.
- Expect your own site to be audited. One tool founder got a point-by-point reply listing the structured data missing from their own homepage.
- Recommending an agency or tool by name, especially as something a friend runs, reads as a plant.
- Scores are low. The top recent post has 12 points, so a few upvotes and a real thread is a good result.
- Comments are fairly long, around 39 words, and about 1 in 15 carries a link.
Self-promotion
There is no self-promotion rule because there are no rules. Tool launches, agency offers and requests for vendors all stay up, and comment threads fill with people naming their own product. The cost is social, not moderation: members have started calling out coordinated plugs in public, and a pitch with no data gets ignored or picked apart. If you promote here, say who you are, show something you measured, and ask a question you actually want answered.
How people write here
- Typical post length
- 175 words
- Typical title length
- 14 words
- Titles phrased as a question
- 34%
- Typical comment length
- 39 words
- Comments that include a link
- 7%
When people post
- 0:00 UTC, 5
- 1:00 UTC, 3
- 2:00 UTC, 7
- 3:00 UTC, 8
- 4:00 UTC, 15
- 5:00 UTC, 19
- 6:00 UTC, 22
- 7:00 UTC, 24
- 8:00 UTC, 16
- 9:00 UTC, 20
- 10:00 UTC, 15
- 11:00 UTC, 31
- 12:00 UTC, 13
- 13:00 UTC, 20
- 14:00 UTC, 28
- 15:00 UTC, 17
- 16:00 UTC, 17
- 17:00 UTC, 25
- 18:00 UTC, 19
- 19:00 UTC, 18
- 20:00 UTC, 26
- 21:00 UTC, 15
- 22:00 UTC, 8
- 23:00 UTC, 9
New posts by hour of day, UTC.
The regulars
The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.
Most active posters
- u/megatech_official20 posts
- u/amrut_ai11 posts
- u/Inner_Structure_49479 posts
- u/houdinidesigns7 posts
- u/Lucky_BAGO5 posts
Most active commenters
- u/abhijeetgupta15 comments
- u/prateekmehraji8 comments
- u/Seo_Dom8 comments
- u/sapindia19767 comments
- u/amrut_ai7 comments
Top keywords
The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/aeo.
- aeo 165 posts
- visibility 126 posts
- search 127 posts
- chatgpt 121 posts
- geo 78 posts
- perplexity 74 posts
- seo 103 posts
- ai search 69 posts
- ai visibility 64 posts
- aeo geo 46 posts
- answers 89 posts
- cited 58 posts
- gemini 69 posts
- brand 81 posts
- google 89 posts
- ai answers 39 posts
- engines 46 posts
- prompts 54 posts
- website recently 20 posts
- vitals performance 20 posts
- visibility security 20 posts
- security core 20 posts
- saas seoloupe 20 posts
- optimize websites 20 posts
- helps optimize 20 posts
- customers bought 20 posts
- checks aeo 20 posts
- citations 43 posts
- answer 77 posts
- prompt 63 posts
- overviews 36 posts
- ai overviews 35 posts
- pages 58 posts
- search visibility 30 posts
- fix prompt 20 posts
- website rank 21 posts
- citation 33 posts
- content 69 posts
- rank 37 posts
- issues holding 20 posts
Recurring topics: ai, aeo, chatgpt, brand, visibility, search, seo, citation, geo, tools.
Posts that did well
- How can I find the AI prompts where my website is being cited?12 upvotes · 34 comments
- Is AEO becoming more important than traditional SEO in 2026, and what strategies are actually working for better visibility in AI search results?10 upvotes · 19 comments
- Has anyone tried Hubspot AI Search Grader to check how LLMs see their brand?10 upvotes · 16 comments
Related subreddits
- r/GEO_optimization
- r/AISearchLab
- r/SEO_for_AI
- r/SEO_tools_reviews
- r/SEO_LLM
- r/AI_SearchOptimization
- r/GenEngineOptimization
- r/SEO_Experts
- r/TechSEO
- r/GEO_chat
Common questions
How much karma do you need to post in r/aeo?
No karma or account age requirement is stated publicly. r/aeo has no rules page, no sidebar text and no AutoModerator messages in our data. About 13% of recent posts were removed, all of them by Reddit's own filters.
Can I promote my AEO tool or agency in r/aeo?
Nothing forbids it, and tool and agency posts stay up. The risk is the reaction. Members have complained in public about fake accounts plugging agencies, and launch posts get few replies unless they include data or a clear disclosure. Say that the product is yours and lead with what you found, not what you sell.
What is r/aeo about?
Answer engine optimization: how brands and pages get mentioned or cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Typical threads cover how to track citations, which prompts to monitor, whether structured data helps, and how much the results change from day to day.
Does r/aeo have rules?
None are published. There is no rules list, no flair and no posting guide. Reddit's sitewide rules apply. Because of that, the quality of a thread depends on who shows up, and some members have asked for written rules to deal with promotion.
Data as of October 4, 2026. Numbers come from public Reddit data (the Arctic Shift archive and GummySearch) sampled on this date. Removal share counts posts taken down by moderators, AutoModerator or Reddit's own filters. Banner and icon belong to the community. Moderators change rules without notice, so treat the sidebar as the final word.
