The reign of forums: How AI made conversation king

SEARCH ENGINE LAND

In a June 2025 analysis of 150,000 AI citations, Semrush found that Reddit was the top source, appearing in more than 40% of LLM responses.

Forums have always reduced support tickets, but because it’s hard to prove a negative, most companies treated both online and offline customer service as cost centers – and the first things to cut. Today, forums still lower service costs and add valuable, search-friendly content. It’s time to redo the math.

Moderation is too much of a hassle: Today’s spam filters, coupled with smart heuristics, enforced policies, and AI-supported moderation, can handle 90% of bad actors. A strong community of users and in-house moderators can easily handle the rest.

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