Reddit is ratcheting up its war on marketing slop.
The company exclusively told CMO Insider that it’s taking new steps to combat spam and keep human conversations at the center of its platform.
First, it’ll prevent suspected spam from appearing in the main home feed while it’s under review. Reddit said in testing, this approach cut spam in the home feed by 28%, user reports of spam in the feed by 11%, and push notifications with spam by 7%. It plans to test this approach in search results next.
Reddit is also taking a few other steps:
- It plans to start explaining to users why it suspects certain content is spam, rather than just showing “Removed by Reddit”
- It won’t recommend posts or comments from accounts that have been asked to verify they’re human or register their automation, but haven’t yet done so
“What’s made Reddit really unique over the last 21 years, and special, is the humanity that you see on Reddit every day,” said Adam Collins, Reddit’s chief communications officer. “Our goal is to preserve that for the future as well. That’s really what these efforts are about.”
Reddit said it had uncovered a coordinated network of 485 accounts that created more than 44,000 pieces of content across the platform, often about work and productivity. These accounts presented themselves as regular users but were, in fact, connected to businesses, violating Reddit’s rules requiring marketing activity to be disclosed.
Reddit said it reversed the potential benefit of the coordinated behavior by removing karma and votes that resulted from the manipulation. Karma is a score on Reddit that measures a user’s reputation.
The spam problem is a particular threat to Reddit, which considers its human-moderated communities to be its greatest advantage over other social platforms.
Reddit vs. AI
After going public in 2024, Reddit increased advertising on its forums and entered into partnerships with OpenAI and Google.
Marketers took note and have been racing to create content for Reddit. Brands particularly hope their efforts will help them show up in AI search, where Reddit is highly cited. The problem: Self-promotional content from brands, especially if they use AI to make it, risks harming the human quality that Reddit sees as setting itself apart from other platforms.
A July report from the AI detection firm Pangram found that Reddit was the least affected by AI among five platforms, with 3% of its short-form content flagged as AI. LinkedIn was at the high end at 30%.
Reddit has been proactive. In July, Reddit announced tools to combat AI-enabled promotional content and spam.
Reddit said at the time that these tools helped catch 23 million spam views per day and cut users’ exposure to spam by about 20% in the period from January to March 2026, compared to the prior three months.
Collins said that while some commercial spam is obvious to users, these tools were able to catch subtler instances, such as spam accounts that appeared to be people interacting with each other.
Moderation is an ongoing Whac-A-Mole game, though, and as long as spammers keep finding workarounds, Reddit’s work will continue.
“The conversations that are happening on Reddit have value,” Collins said. “We have to continue to adjust and continue to improve our efforts to remove that kind of content to make sure that it continues to be that great value of a place for users.”
What marketers are saying
Agency execs who spoke with CMO Insider said brands that use Reddit as intended — by listening to their consumers and being useful to them — won’t be affected by the spam crackdown.
“The brands that win will earn participation by being transparent, useful, and native to each community, while giving customers genuine reasons to talk about them,” said Joe Gagliese, co-CEO of Viral Nation.
Brian Yamada, chief innovation officer at VML, said the sugar rush some brands got by manipulating Reddit would be short-lived.
Slop isn’t going away, though, he added.
“It’s not just a Reddit problem,” Yamada said. “The flood of generative AI slop is likely to continue as brands or companies are looking for shortcuts or cheats to get visible.”
Collins said Reddit has an appeals process to correct false positives and that it’s letting suspected spam remain while it’s under review.
Moderators and users play an important gatekeeping role on Reddit, and Collins said that wouldn’t change. Moderators can still review and approve content for their communities, but limiting suspected spam during a review period would help prevent users from being exposed to it, he said.
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