Reddit removed all 4 subreddit communities we built for our 60-day GEO engagement experiment. The reason given was a breach of Rule 2 of Reddit’s Content Policy. Every post, every comment thread, every ranking URL and every AI citation that pointed at them went with the communities.
We are publishing this because the GEO experiment that produced one of our most-read GEO studies used a method that Reddit classifies as content manipulation. The finding was real. If you are planning to invest in Reddit GEO to increase AI Search visibility, the cost of getting this wrong is the part of our study we did not publish the first time. We want to share with the community key tips to guarantee Reddit success.
Key Findings (TL;DR)
100% of our Reddit assets gone in one action. Four communities, 240 posts, 1,485 subscribers, 20 keyword rankings, 474 AI citations. Nothing restored.
Banned under Rule 2, content manipulation. We injected the engagement. Our own methodology section described it.
Owning the community protected nothing. Reddit’s internal system still detected our bots but also human community members posting in our owned subreddits.
ChatGPT 5.6 made Reddit less impactful. On 8 August 2026 reddit.com fell 89% on ChatGPT, 4.01% to 0.44%, with nobody banned.
Proven to work despite the Reddit ban: The experiment still beat years-old communities. In 60-days, our subreddits reached 6th place in total citations out of 126 already established subreddits.
10 Tipsto do Reddit GEO without getting banned: In an interview with SORN.ai, it is recommended that you stick to a few rules: humans only, no bots, high karma, buyers over audience size, one branded post per 5-8 posts, nothing promotional.
Version A (dormant): Just threads – no comments or upvotes.
Version B (active): Threads + comments and upvotes
Version C: Threads + upvotes only. No comments.
Version D: Threads + comment only. No upvotes.
All four communities were banned under Rule 2.
The removal was not a moderator action, a shadowban, or a post-level takedown. It was an administrative ban at the Reddit community level, which removed the community pages completely and, every thread inside it, and every URL that pointed at any of them.
We also tested automated bots posting during this period. It was flagged. In our interview with the Marketing agency SORN.AI, their operations lead put it plainly before we told her what had happened to us: “if you try to automate it with bots, you start getting flagged by the Reddit algorithm.”says Stanislava Smiljanić, lead SEO strategist at SORN.ai.
What Reddit’s Rule 2 Says, and What We Did
Rule 2 of Reddit’s Content Policy reads:
Three parts of our design sit inside that definition.
Engagement was injected, not earned. The original article documents Version B as receiving 10 replies and 20 upvotes on each thread. That is vote manipulation and manufactured discussion, described in our own methodology section.
Injection the independent variable. Version C was configured for 50 upvotes and 0 comments, Version D for 0 upvotes and 50 comments. The experiment used bots to reach the desired amount of interaction needed for the experiment.
We posted near-identical content across four communities we controlled, on the same 60 topics, on the same schedule. Four communities running the same script is a detection pattern, not a coincidence Reddit needed to investigate.
What the Reddit ban cost us
Everything the experiment built existed only on reddit.com. None of it was portable.
Asset built over 60 days
At Day 60
After the ban
Total AI citations
3,740
0
Cited URLs
21
0
Google keywords ranked
27 across both versions
0
Monthly search volume covered
3,560
0
Keywords with an AI Overview present
15
0
Subscribers (active communities)
1,485
0
Published posts across four communities
240
0
Community management invested over 60 days.
30 hours (or 15h per month)
Not recoverable
The two numbers worth sitting with are the last two. Thirty hours of manual community management produced a result that no longer exists in any form.
Set that against the scale of the communities we were benchmarking against. The five most-cited external subreddits in our dataset held between 7,055 and 425,013 subscribers, with years of indexed threads behind them. Our exposure was 60 days. Theirs is measured in years. The enforcement action is the same size in both cases, and it arrives without warning, without a staged penalty, and without a route back to the content.
What this means for your GEO strategy: Price your Reddit investment as a lease, not an asset. Anything that lives only on a platform you do not control should be sized to what you can afford to lose in one action, and mirrored somewhere you own before it becomes load-bearing.
Ghost Citations effect: How banned Reddit communities still get cited
This graph shows the total daily citations of all the Reddit communities that were created for the Reddit GEO engagement experiment.
After misuse of automation bots were detected all 4 communities were simultaneously banned with no prior warning around the period of 22nd of June. The citation count gradually dropped after this period (as a result of the Ghost Citations effect).
After the period of 8th of August (that coincided with the rollout of the ChatGPT 5.6 Update) we saw that none of the Reddit communities were cited ever since.
How the ChatGPT 5.6 Update made Reddit less important
On 8 August 2026, reddit.com fell from 4.01% to 0.44% of all ChatGPT citations in the United States, a decline of 89%. The fall was not gradual. It arrived in two steps, on 8 August and again on 14 August.
The key lesson here: As August 8th showed us that AI citations are vulnerable to algorithmic changes on AI Search Engines, it means that good GEO requires activity on different platforms to gain AI visibility. Do not put all your eggs in one basket (or channel).
Every industry fell, and total citation volume went up at the same time.
As our AI Search Index has shown. Reddit declined on all 17 industries that we tracked, by between 58% and 99%. No single sector drove the result. Over the same period ChatGPT increased its total daily citations by 23%, so this was not a volume effect or a collection gap. ChatGPT kept citing. It stopped citing Reddit.
How much Reddit lost and gained ground on 7 AI Search Engines
Reddit’s position by AI Search Platform tells a different story from the headline. On the two Google surfaces it strengthened over the same quarter.
AI Search Platform
3 Jul to 7 Aug
8 to 31 Aug
September
Jul to Sep
Google AI Overviews
4.375%
4.490%
5.081%
+16%
Google AI Mode
3.625%
2.803%
4.502%
+24%
Perplexity
1.176%
2.163%
2.186%
+86%
Gemini
1.727%
1.220%
1.167%
-32%
ChatGPT
3.765%
0.374%
0.227%
-94%
Microsoft Copilot
0.000%
0.000%
0.000%
No change
Claude
0.000%
0.000%
0.000%
No change
Two of the seven platforms (Claude and Microsoft Copilot) do not use Reddit as a source in any meaningful way. A Reddit strategy built on the assumption of universal coverage is wrong about two engines before it starts, and after August it was wrong about a third.
What this means for your GEO strategy: Depending on what platforms you prioritize (like Claude), it might not be worth investing in Reddit GEO at all.
10 Tips to guarantee Reddit GEO success
We interviewed Stanislava Smiljanic and Eri Georgiev of the marketing agency SORN.AI about their Reddit practices for GEO. They run placements for clients in communities they do not own, which is harder than what we attempted, and done so successfully without getting banned. Their process is more disciplined than ours was in every respect that matters.
10 Tips to do Reddit GEO successfully
Compliant to Reddit’s Rules?
1. Everything is run in-house by a human team. No bots, no scheduling automation for engagement. Their reasoning: automation gets flagged by Reddit’s systems.
Compliant
2. Post where the audience already is. They used OtterlyAI prompt data to identify which communities their client’s buyers were already active in, rather than choosing communities by size.
Compliant
3. Roughly one branded post for every five to eight non-branded posts. Their words: probably between every five and eight non-branded posts would maybe put a branded post.
Compliant
4. Avoid being promotional. Posts that look like a sales page get removed, so the content has to carry value on its own terms.
Compliant
5. Write objectively, including weaknesses. They deliberately avoided over-praising the client in placements, and said so unprompted.
Compliant
6. Expect the pace to slow. Reddit’s filters tightened through 2026. Their description: we are basically facing a crisis, working at a much slower pace, and sometimes healthy accounts get removed.
Compliant
7. Use Reddit accounts with established karma, genuine posting history. We discovered that IP-addresses in Western countries were less likely to be banned.
Rule 2 risk. Operating accounts that are not what they appear to be is content manipulation however well it is run.
8.Warm up your Reddit accounts. Most activity is ordinary participation, with brand recommendations appearing occasionally. Multiple comments a day is fine as long as promotion stays rare.
Rule 2 risk where the participation exists to make a later placement credible.
9. Post in related subreddit topics. and each cluster only posts in a consistent set of related subreddits so the behavior reads as one real person with one set of interests.
Rule 2 risk. Coordinated account networks fall inside the manipulation definition.
10. Adjust your post frequency. Posting frequency is set per account, based on its history and the communities it posts in. There is no fixed rate.
Context dependent. Judgement about frequency is not itself a breach.
The honest reading of that table: the top seven rows are good marketing practice that happen to also be compliant. The next three are tradecraft. They reduce the chance of detection and they do not change what Rule 2 says.
What this means for your GEO strategy: If you cannot staff Reddit with people who will participate in those communities for their own sake, do not run a Reddit program or use bots. An average of 15h per month is needed to maintain a Reddit community in a natural way. Every shortcut that closes the staffing gap is on the list above, and the ones that work are the ones that carry the ban risk.
What Not To Do on Reddit for GEO (this gets you banned)
Do not inject upvotes or comments. This is the specific conduct Rule 2 names. It is also what we did, and it is why four communities are gone.
Do not run automated bots for posting or engagement. Reddit’s systems flag automation. We tested it and our communities were removed within two months.
Do not assume your own community is a safe harbor. Owning the subreddit stops moderators from removing your threads. It does nothing against an administrative ban, which takes the community and every URL in it in one action.
Do not run near-identical content across multiple communities you control. Four communities posting the same 60 topics on the same days is a pattern, and patterns are what detection systems are built to find.
Don’t believe “GEO agencies” that can do Reddit hacks: Building a lasting community that provides valuable information is important, there are no shortcuts.
Got a GEO experiment idea? Let’s collaborate.
At OtterlyAI, we don’t write about AI Search from the sidelines. We test it. With the community, we run and update a public GEO Experimentation Tracker showing what we are running and what moved AI Search. If you are running your own GEO experiment, email rick.tousseyn@otterly.ai and we may feature it with your name attributed.
👉 Want to measure your AI Visibility? Start with OtterlyAI and our GEO Guide.
