ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Reddit’s new feature builds reviews from user posts.
- More than 10,000 products are included.
- The feature will weed out fake reviews.
If you regularly turn to Reddit for product advice, your experience is about to change.
How Reddit Reviews work
When you search for a product on Reddit, you’ll see an “easy-to-digest format” that has a “what people are saying” recap. A visual breakdown will show whether conversations are generally positive, mixed, or negative, as well as common sentiments among users. If you want to go deeper, Reddit says you can browse comments about a product, apply topic filters, read original user discussions, ask follow-up questions, or explore other commonly compared products.
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In an example shared by Reddit, a user searches for “Best headphones 2026.” The search returns several results with tags like “Very positive,” “Positive,” and “Mixed.” Clicking on one expands to a review that says, “Reddit likes the XL224’s fantastic battery life, powerful bass, and strong sound quality, while the steep price and fit on smaller heads draws criticism.”
“A mix of generative AI and other in-house technology” is used to identify themes and summarize what people are saying, a representative explained, and added that “the technologies and models we use may evolve over time to best support the experience.”
Fighting fake reviews
Perhaps the most important part is that Reddit Reviews are shaped by users, and companies can’t pay to have product features. For a community sensitive to commercialization, this is a big deal.
My first concern was about bots or other fake reviews, but a Reddit representative said they’re taking that into consideration. “Platform-wide,” the representative said, “we are labeling apps and prompting accounts we detect to be running automations to either verify there’s a human behind the username or be labeled as an app.” In this context, an app is a registered API client that’s developed to interact with Reddit (including posting, commenting, upvoting, and scraping). In short, the system will label known bots.
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Specifically for reviews, a “review conversation” will appear that describes a person’s experience with a product. Reddit also has “defined rules,” it says, “to help our LLMs identify these review conversations based on the surrounding conversation for context.”
How to try Reddit Reviews
You’ll start to see Reddit Reviews over the next few weeks in the US on iOS, Android, and browser versions of the site. Around 10,000 products across electronics, health and beauty, home and garden, and fashion and apparel will be available to start.
I find myself frequently adding “reddit” to Google searches for everything from the best restaurants in a city to the best headphones for my kids, so these overviews are definitely intriguing. It’s not easy right now to wade through numerous threads, so if this does make it easier to get true user sentiment, it could be a big plus.
