It is a consequence of the Margulis dichotomy that when an arithmetic hyperbolic manifold contains one totally geodesic hypersurface, it contains infinitely many. Both Reid and McMullen have asked conversely whether the existence of infinitely many geodesic hypersurfaces implies arithmeticity of the corresponding hyperbolic manifold. In this talk, I will discuss recent results answering this question in the affirmative. In particular, I will describe how this follows from a general superrigidity style theorem for certain natural representations of fundamental groups of hyperbolic manifolds. If time permits, I will also discuss a recent extension of these techniques into the complex hyperbolic setting, which requires the aforementioned superrigidity theorems as well as some theorems in incidence geometry due to Pozzetti. This is joint work with Bader, Fisher, and Stover.