The AI bubble on Reddit: when people started saying it, and where

When did Reddit start talking about an AI bubble?

The phrase “AI bubble” has been a common part of worried headlines about tech stocks over the past year. I was interested in when it started being used on Reddit, and by which communities it’s most used.

I looked up the phrase “AI bubble” (with any usual spelling and capitalization) on Reddit, from January 2022 through September 2026. I found 151,335 comments with a match. Since the volume of comments each month changes, I thought raw counts would be misleading. Instead, I used a rate: matches per million comments that month. I dropped comments from known bots and comments with a moderator badge, then plotted the rate each month.

For most of 2022, the phrase was almost entirely absent; there were just 40 matching comments for the entire year. I expected to see the same low level through 2024, but I was wrong.

After a long, low plateau that lasts until July 2025, the rate almost triples within one month, then peaks at 53 per million in November 2025, three months later. Since then it has been down, but not all the way back to where it started.

It’s currently at 26 per million in September 2026, roughly half of the peak, and still about 13 times the average of the first six months of 2024. I was curious if this meant the talk had died down, or if the phrase had cooled off, but was still much higher than when it started.

Before I quote from this data, there are two things to be careful about. First, this is tracking one phrase, not people’s overall opinions. Second, this is just one phrase that the idea grew into being a more common label for over these years; I’ll cover that in the next section.

Is AI a bubble, according to Reddit?

But I know that this question is not answerable from this data, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. All this phrase match stuff shows is that someone wrote down this particular phrase, it says nothing about what anyone believes about the future of AI companies.

I gave 150 comments with hits to the phrase (from the above November 2025 and August 2024 searches) to two language models, along with the text around them. They disagreed on only one comment, which was later identified as a “miss” on a third pass. The other 149 were real uses of the phrase.

A bigger problem is the reverse case: it’s possible to talk about the AI bubble without having those two words right next to each other. To capture this, I searched for comments containing “bubble” plus one of several words related to AI (Nvidia, OpenAI, data center etc) but not including the exact phrase itself.

Here are some changes that are worth remembering when you read the big version of the above (the “bubble” + any AI term) in the comments: Between those two months, the rate of the phrase was ×12.8 higher. If you widen the wordings to include “bubble” plus any AI term in the comments not just as part of a phrase it’s ×9.5 higher. The discussion really did grow, but the phrase’s rise is also partly due to it becoming the standard label for the thing.

Another goal of this article was to test whether the peaks in these charts lined up with the decline in AI stocks, and I still don’t know the answer. There are no verified series of stock prices here. Any claimed correlation between a particular market event and a particular peak in one of these charts is entirely untested, so take it with a grain of salt.

Investing subreddits versus everyone else

The list of investing subreddits was fixed before any analysis, a set of twenty investing subreddits, like r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/Bogleheads, and r/personalfinance. The “other” group contains all the rest of the Reddit communities.

On a per-comment basis, the investing group uses this phrase far more often, and the gap is huge. In November 2025, the phrase was used at a rate of 2,606 instances per million comments in those subreddits, compared to only 43 instances per million comments across the rest of Reddit. That’s a ratio of about 61×.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that those subreddits are a tiny part of Reddit overall, and I think size is a more weighty consideration here than the rate. That month, they accounted for only 0.41% of all comments on the site, but 19.9% of all comments containing that phrase. Over the whole period, they accounted for only 15.3% of all matches to that phrase, so most comments containing it were written elsewhere. But the share was still shrinking over time, as the below charts show (by year).

It’s not like investors are losing interest, because their own rate is still higher than anything they’d achieved in 2023. Instead, it seems the rest of Reddit started saying it too. After all, that’s a far larger population than the investors, as you’ve already seen.

Timing is also different: while there was one month that was clearly dominant for the investing subreddits, for the rest of Reddit, the following month (December 2025) was almost as good as the best month. Outside the investing list, the high point actually stretched across two months.

Try itHow often any phrase, like "AI bubble", comes up on Reddit, month by month since 2005: Historical search

Which subreddits say it most

If you look at the raw number of comments that matched, r/wallstreetbets comes out on top, with 12,400 matches, or 8.2% of all matches. It’s followed by r/technology and then r/pcmasterrace, but otherwise the raw totals are fairly reflective of the size of the subreddit. To get a fairer measure, I also calculated the rate of matches within each community, rather than looking at raw numbers. To avoid a small forum winning just by luck, I only included subreddits that had at least a hundred matches in my analysis.

r/BetterOffline has the highest rate, at 3,695 per million comments. Next are several single-stock forums (r/NBIS_Stock, r/NvidiaStock) along with a few hardware and gaming subreddits (r/RigBuild, r/PS6).

It’s possible that this is just a matter of community mix, one unmeasured factor that could be affecting these results. It’s possible that some of the peak came from people talking about hardware and tech rather than the markets, for example. I’m not sure how to disentangle comments about market worries from comments about graphics card prices.

To see if this rise was just due to new communities, I checked to see if the rate had changed within the ten biggest subreddits that were present in all three windows.

Sure enough, ten big subreddits that were around for all of the above periods, the rate has gone up there too. For example, in r/technology, the rate went from 68 per million in the first half of 2024 to 3,055 during its peak month. Even in r/AskReddit, where literally anything can be asked about, the rate went from 1.2 to 43.

Try itWho writes in any subreddit, when to post there and what does well: Subreddits

The phrase also predates the hype cycle, peaking in November 2025 and still remaining well above its earlier baseline. The investing subreddits have the highest rate per comment. Yet the bulk of comments containing the phrase still come from other subreddits. Ultimately, only the market can judge who was right and who was wrong, and this particular visualization won’t settle that debate.

If you have any further data questions, I’ll try to answer them when I get the chance next.

What this data can't tell you

Method

Planned before looking, and found while analysing

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask

The data

• CSVAll comments by monthComments containing 'AI bubble' per million comments for each month from January 2022 to September 2026, with the base and 95% interval.
• CSVInvesting subreddits by monthThe same monthly rate inside the fixed list of investing subreddits.
• CSVThe rest of Reddit by monthThe same monthly rate outside the investing list.
• CSVBy yearAll comments, matching comments, the rate per million and the investing share of matches, by year.
• CSVSubreddits with the most matchesMatching comments and share of all matches.
• CSVSubreddits by rateMatching comments per million comments with 95% intervals, for subreddits with at least a hundred matches.
• CSVTen large subredditsRates in January to June 2024, the peak month and the last month.
• CSVOther wordingsShare of AI-bubble comments the phrase catches in two months, and the growth of the phrase against all such comments.
• CSVPosts by monthPosts containing 'AI bubble' per million posts from August 2023, a lower bound because removed posts lose their text.
• PNGMain chart as an imageThe monthly chart on this page as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24248225