Authority vs. Authenticity: The Complementary Roles of Wikipedia and Reddit in Generative AI
AI chatbots lean heavily on two surprisingly similar—but fundamentally different—corners of the internet. One prizes authority, the other authenticity. Together, they’re reshaping how brands appear in AI-driven answers.
You can’t put it much more succinctly than New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: “SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO.”* With generative AI now a starting point for internet research, brands and agencies are rushing to understand the new landscape, and to answer the question: who, or what, is influencing this new influencer?
Two platforms stand out: Wikipedia and Reddit. Or, as Search Engine Roundtable put it even more directly: “ChatGPT Mostly Sources Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit”. Both span countless topics, are openly accessible, use natural language, and update constantly. Wikipedia is better structured and grounded in facts; Reddit is looser, more conversational, and more authentic—especially when it comes to opinions and perspectives. Each plays a complementary role in shaping what people, and AI, know.
For organizations concerned with visibility and accuracy in AI answers, each can seem like a puzzle to solve. At first glance, they might appear to be very different: one is an encyclopedia and the other a discussion forum. Look a little closer, and striking similarities emerge. But look closer still, and the differences turn out to be just as revealing.
Common DNA from an Earlier Internet
Wikipedia and Reddit were influential long before generative AI. But the rise of popular AI tools has given their content new uses, new pathways to discovery, and new challenges for those trying to understand how they influence the public record.
Both are built on user-generated content, mostly text. Unlike the dominant social media platforms, especially the video-driven ones, neither pays its most essential contributors. Wikipedia has editors and administrators; Reddit has “redditors” and moderators. These communities create the content and enforce the rules, while their parent organizations—the Wikimedia Foundation and Reddit Inc.—intervene only in rare circumstances.
They also come from the same internet era: the early 2000s, before social media shifted power toward algorithm-driven feeds. Wikipedia launched in 2001; Reddit in 2005. Both still look, feel, and operate much as they did in those early years. Neither runs on the opaque, engagement-maximizing algorithms that power most social platforms today. Neither had to pivot away from its initial concept—though Reddit spent a few years retooling its design and strategy—and both retain a certain reputation for being from a “better time” when the internet was more human and less commercial.
Both are broadly—though not without debate—considered “high-trust” websites. Neither site is always right, but both are consistent, show their work, and enforce the rules their communities take seriously. They allow contributors to remain pseudonymous, but reputations within the community are earned over time. That trust can be lost, especially if contributors misrepresent their identities or financial motives. And while their policies differ—Wikipedia’s are explicit about paid editing and conflicts of interest, Reddit’s are more about “authentic content” and avoiding manipulation—the cultural expectation is the same: serve the community first, and don’t try to bend the platform to marketing goals. On Reddit, well-handled corporate interactions can sometimes fit in; on Wikipedia, the edit request process is cumbersome, but it’s the only route that works long term.
Cultural Influence and Traffic
As of mid-2025, both sites are consistently among the world’s top ten, even recently trading spots, according to Similarweb and Semrush. Wikipedia has been a top-ten fixture since George W. Bush’s second term, driven largely by its visibility in Google search results and frequent citations in the media. Reddit’s rise has been more recent, outlasting peers like Slashdot and Stack Overflow to become a regular presence in 2024 after making occasional appearances. Part of that surge comes from users adding “reddit” to search queries, then Google responding by putting its thumb on the scale to boost the site further; a similar, though less common, habit is adding ‘wiki’ to searches. But these techniques come with a downside: good luck finding news about either platform on Google these days.
Traffic on both follows the familiar power law curve: a few highly active areas dominate attention, while the vast majority see relatively little. On Wikipedia, the most-visited pages are often tied to news, politics, entertainment, and pop culture. On Reddit, timewastery subreddits like r/todayilearned, r/movies, and r/funny post the biggest numbers. At the other extreme, many Wikipedia pages go months or years without edits, while some subreddits gather tumbleweeds—or disappear entirely if they lose their moderators.
It’s an artifact of their design: Wikipedia articles continue to be useful independent of ongoing changes, while on Reddit ongoing changes is only the reason to have a subreddit in the first place. Wikipedia articles are built to last and be updated over time; Reddit posts are ephemeral, with rare exceptions—consider the 2017 viral r/AskReddit thread with people defending their decision to patronize the Times Square Olive Garden.
Where the Similarities End
The sharpest contrasts between Wikipedia and Reddit come from the very different purposes they were built to serve.
Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it allows only one article per topic. But Reddit has no such restriction. If you don’t like one community, you can go start another: the carefully curated r/science spun off the more freewheeling r/EverythingScience, not to mention smaller communities like r/ScienceFacts and r/sciences. On Reddit, a post belongs to its author and can’t be changed by anyone else—within reason, everyone gets their own say. On Wikipedia, content is unsigned, collectively owned—and you can definitely expect someone to come along and write over you at some point.
Their rules work differently, too:
Wikipedia operates under a comprehensive set of sitewide policies designed to maintain consistency across all articles, while Reddit’s sitewide rules are looser, focusing more on general community behavior than uniform standards.
Both also have layers of local rules, but they work differently: On Wikipedia, topic-specific rules—like notability criteria or style guides—apply across all articles in the same subject area. On Reddit, each subreddit sets its own rules, from limiting post types to imposing minimum karma thresholds or banning certain topics entirely.
Enforcement reflects these differences—Wikipedia administrators cannot simply impose their will; major decisions are discussed publicly and can be appealed. On Reddit, one mod can bring down the banhammer, and there's nothing you can do about it. Wikipedia may call itself “not a democracy”, but in practice it operates far closer to one than Reddit.
Tone and sourcing are another divide. Wikipedia demands a neutral approach and high-quality sources for almost everything. Reddit thrives on opinions, subjectivity, and informality, with sourcing optional unless a subreddit requires it.
Finally, their business models have absolutely nothing in common, with far-reaching consequences. Wikipedia is a nonprofit and Reddit is a public company, which puts them in very different positions with regard to AI companies. Reddit has struck lucrative licensing deals with Google and OpenAI and is suing Anthropic—almost certainly to land a similar arrangement.
Wikipedia lives in an entirely different world. Beyond its nonprofit status, its mission and founding principles forbid monetizing content the same way. Articles are “free as in liberty” and “free as in beer”—both libre and gratis—released under a Creative Commons license that lets anyone, including commercial players, use them. The Wikimedia Foundation has partnered with Kaggle to release a cleaned dataset for scraping to ease the load on its public servers, but it cannot require AI companies to use it or pay for access.
What It Means for AEO, GEO, LLMO, or Your Favorite Acronym
The shared, community-driven nature of both platforms means brands can’t dictate their narratives on either one. Influence comes from earning credibility in ways that align with each platform’s culture and purpose.
Wikipedia’s structured, authoritative content often appears nearly verbatim in AI-generated answers, Knowledge Panels, and featured snippets. Accuracy and completeness are critical because errors will almost certainly turn up somewhere else. Reddit’s conversational and subjective content serves a different role: it captures sentiment and offers real-world texture that AI uses to make answers feel human.
They work best together—Wikipedia establishing the factual baseline, Reddit supplying the perspective and nuance.
A Few Bullets for Your PR Playbook
A few principles worth copying and pasting for future reference hold true for both:
You can influence the conversation but not control it. On Wikipedia, that means offering useful improvements rather than forcing changes. On Reddit, it means authentic participation instead of drive-by promotion.
Play the long game. Wikipedia rewards content that serves its mission; Reddit rewards consistent, culturally aware engagement.
Respect the norms. Wikipedia values transparency, verifiability, and neutrality; Reddit values humor, authenticity, and humility.
Disclose interests. Wikipedia requires it. Reddit punishes dishonesty, even if it’s not a formal rule.
Use each for its strengths: Wikipedia for establishing authority, Reddit for real-time sentiment and brand engagement.
In an AI-driven search environment, Wikipedia and Reddit are two of the most important levers for shaping public understanding. They operate on different timelines, with different rules, and different currencies of trust—but PR professionals who can navigate both will be in the strongest position to shape how brands are seen in the years to come, when AI will decide what the world knows.
*Generative Engine Optimization, also called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), sometimes used interchangeably with AI Optimization (AIO), and still referred to by a few holdouts as LLMO—the practice of influencing what generative AI says about a given subject.
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