As the scramble to optimize content for AI consumption and citation heats up, clients keep coming to us puzzled about the internet’s favorite genderless alien doodle, Reddit, and what it means for their short-term SEO and AI Overview plans. Their questions usually sound like this: Should we be proactively posting or replying about our brand on Reddit? If AI models are trained on Reddit, does that mean we should invest in Reddit ads? Our CEO wants a separate subreddit for every product line—should we do it? Why is Google’s AI Overview pulling a Reddit thread that says my product is slow and hard to use? The core issue is that people tend to mash together three separate ideas: Training data. Licensed or real-time access. Citation and retrieval systems. These are connected, but they’re not the same thing. And if you care about SEO, AI-era brand visibility, or why Reddit suddenly shows up in AI Overviews about your company, you need to understand how they differ. AI training vs. AI access vs. AI citation Let’s tease apart three concepts that are often conflated. People see statements like: “ChatGPT was trained on Reddit.” …and assume that every Reddit post is stored verbatim inside ChatGPT, ready to be spit back out whenever someone asks a related question. That’s not how training actually works. Training Training an AI is much closer to going through school than to memorizing an encyclopedia. Over years of learning, kids internalize patterns, relationships, and ways to apply knowledge. They don’t retain the exact wording of the answer to question 8b…