Reddit blocks 23 million spam views a day. Moderators are still catching the rest by hand.

Reddit was the most-cited domain in May across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's Gemini and AI Mode, according to data Semrush compiled for The Verge. That is why marketers are seeding brand mentions inside Reddit threads hoping to get picked up by AI answers. It is also why the question of how Reddit is responding has two separate answers: one from the company, one from the volunteers who moderate it.

The company's answer

• In early July, Reddit said it added AI and LLMs to its spam detection to catch "the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype."

• The company says the system now catches 25,000 spammy posts and comments and blocks 23 million spam views a day.

• Spokesperson Jared Nelson declined to name the specific signals the system checks, so it doesn't hand spammers a playbook. He said accounts are evaluated at creation and checked for coordinated activity across accounts and conversations.

The moderators' answer

• r/SkincareAddiction, a subreddit with more than 1 million weekly visitors, bans brand-affiliated accounts and now automatically filters mentions of Honeydew Labs, a skincare brand whose posts moderators traced back to a single suspicious account, for manual review.

• Moderator Maya Adivi says spam now mimics how someone prompts a chatbot: an open-ended question like "How does everyone keep track of their skincare routine?" followed by a wave of on-brand replies.

• A moderator of r/salestechniques posted a public "name and shame" thread listing brands accused of astroturfing. Users on r/BuyItForLife and r/CleaningTips have raised the same alarm, and r/FoodNYC's rules already call out brands that comment on old posts to self-promote.

Reddit itself says roughly 40 percent of its discussions are commercial in nature already. That is the tension here: automated detection has to work at the level of authentic-sounding conversation while commerce itself stays allowed, and the source does not say how the AI system and moderator judgment divide that work. What is clear is that individual moderators are still the ones reading threads closely enough to catch Honeydew Labs and the rest.

For anyone doing GEO work on Reddit: if a mention would not survive a moderator's second look, it is a liability.