Replying on Reddit without getting banned
Everyone repeats the 9:1 rule: only one in ten of your posts should be your own content. It gets quoted in every guide to Reddit marketing as though it were the law.
We went looking for it in Reddit's actual policies. It is not in the Content Policy. It is not in the Reddit Rules. It is not in the spam policy.
It survives in exactly one place, and that place tells you what it is.
What the 9:1 rule actually is
It is on the Reddiquette page, updated 18 August 2025, which opens by describing itself:
Reddiquette is an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves. Please abide by it the best you can.
And then, further down:
A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content.
So: real text, on a real Reddit-hosted page — described by Reddit as informal, written by users rather than by Reddit, and explicitly a "rule of thumb." It is community custom, and worth respecting as custom. It is not what gets you banned.
What is enforceable
The spam policy, updated 19 May 2026, is the operative rule, and it contains no ratio and no number at all:
Do not use Reddit for repeated or unsolicited mass engagement.
Its guidance on avoiding the label is deliberately non-numeric:
If your contributions to Reddit consist primarily of links to a business that you run, own, or otherwise benefit from, please be thoughtful about the frequency of posting… Note that community moderators adjudicate what constitutes unwanted/spammy content in their communities and may take action accordingly.
That final clause is the whole game. There is no sitewide number because the operative rule is whatever the moderators of that specific subreddit decide it is. Reddit says so itself.
Which means the actually useful advice is not a ratio. It is: open the subreddit's rules in the sidebar and read them before you post. They vary enormously, several ban vendor participation outright, and some have changed recently. We are not going to reproduce a table of them here, because we could not verify one — the pages that publish such tables are Reddit-marketing vendors citing each other, and at least one is a lead magnet with no stated methodology. Read the sidebar. It takes ten seconds and it is the only source that binds.
Reddit explicitly permits being a company
This surprises people who have absorbed the folklore, so it is worth quoting. The impersonation policy, updated 19 May 2026, prohibits misrepresenting "identity or affiliation to deceive others" — and lists as permitted:
- Discussing a company's products under its name
- Operating official brand communities for direct engagement
You may stay anonymous on Reddit. You may not pretend not to be who you are. Being a vendor in a thread about your category is allowed; being a vendor pretending to be a delighted stranger is the violation.
The related manipulated content policy, same date, bans "deceptive interactions" and gives as a violating example an organisation "using multiple, seemingly unconnected accounts" across communities. It also requires that AI-generated content be tagged as such.
The FTC is stricter than Reddit
Here is the part most Reddit marketing advice skips entirely.
Reddit has no affirmative rule requiring you to disclose your employer when you reply about your own product. It bans deception about identity, which is adjacent but not the same thing.
United States law does require it. The FTC's Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), effective 21 October 2024, makes it an unfair or deceptive practice for a business to disseminate a testimonial by "one of its officers, managers, employees, or agents" that "fails to have a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the testimonialist's material relationship to the business, when the relationship is not otherwise clear to the audience."
Note the word agents. That reaches the agency you hired to post for you.
And on where the disclosure has to live, the FTC's endorsement guidance is direct:
listing your employer on your profile page isn't enough
Which is exactly the shortcut people take on Reddit. A bio that says "founder of Acme" does not cover a comment recommending Acme. The disclosure belongs in the comment.
Civil penalties for rule violations ran to $53,088 per violation as of the FTC's January 2025 inflation adjustment.
The practical upshot is simple, and it is stricter than the ratio everyone worries about: say who you are, in the comment, in the first line. It is both the legal requirement and — conveniently — the thing that makes Reddit not hate you.
What actually gets accounts banned
Reddit's documented enforcement ladder, updated 6 August 2026, is: content removal, a warning, then a 3-day suspension, then 7 days, then a permanent ban. Appeals are accepted within six months.
Two corrections to widespread belief:
Shadowbans are largely folklore now. We could not find a single current Reddit help article documenting them. Reddit moved to suspensions with notification and appeal roughly a decade ago. What people experience as a shadowban is usually AutoModerator or a moderator removing content — your comment exists for you and not for anyone else, which feels identical and is a different mechanism with a different fix: message the moderators.
Ban evasion has a jurisdictional quirk. For a community-level ban, Reddit only actions evasion reports filed by that community's own moderators. Practically: if a competitor is evading a ban in a subreddit you do not moderate, you cannot report it in a way that goes anywhere.
The way companies actually get burned
The best-documented recent case is not a ban. It is a company publishing its own evidence.
In November 2025, Kotaku reported that the marketing agency Trap Plan had published a case study boasting about running 40-plus posts across subreddits via fake accounts styled as organic player discovery, for a game called War Robots: Frontiers. The case study's own line:
Most players didn't even realize they were part of a marketing effort.
Reddit users found the case study. The agency deleted it. Its CEO then said the activity had not been authorised by the client.
The mechanism is worth internalising: the campaign was not detected by Reddit's spam systems. It was detected because someone bragged about it in public, in writing, on the open web. Anything you would not put in a case study is a thing you should not be doing.
The actual rules, condensed
- Read the subreddit's sidebar rules. They bind; the 9:1 folklore does not.
- Disclose in the comment, first line. Legal requirement, and it is what makes people willing to read the rest.
- One account, yours. Multiple "unconnected" accounts is the specific thing the manipulated content policy names.
- Answer the question that was asked. If your product is not the right answer, say so — that is the reply that earns the next one.
- Never vote-manipulate or ask colleagues to. Coordinated voting is explicitly prohibited, and so is mass-reporting a competitor.
- Tag AI-generated content where you use it, per Reddit's policy.
- Do not brag about it afterwards.
What we build, and what we refuse to
FishOut drafts a reply with the thread loaded and disclosure in it. It does not post. There is no setting to make it post, and we are not going to add one — automated posting and vote manipulation break the rules quoted above, and the failure mode takes your brand with it.
The replies documentation covers how the drafting works. The free plan is 10 keywords on Reddit, Hacker News and three more sources if you want to see what reaches you before deciding whether any of this applies to you.
Reddit policy quotations here were read from Reddit's help centre on 5 September 2026, each with the update date shown. The FTC rule text is quoted from Cornell's Legal Information Institute. This is not legal advice — the disclosure rules are real, and a lawyer who knows your jurisdiction is worth more than a blog post. If we have something wrong, tell us.