Reddit Deleted 74% of Our Comments. Now It's 2.4%
Happy Tuesday!
In March, I stood on a stage in Shenzhen and showed a room full of SEOs our Reddit comment deletion rate: 14.84%.
I was weirdly proud of that number. The trendline was finally heading the right way, and I had a “crisis averted” story for every spike.
This week, I re-ran the numbers across our entire Reddit win history:
- 2,670 brand mention comments.
- 411 different subreddits.
- Every single one tracked.
Our deletion rate in May: 2.4%
For context, Reddit's own moderation data shows users shared 2.2 billion posts and comments in the back half of 2025, and mods and admins removed over 150 million of them. That's roughly 7% sitewide.
Read that again: Jolly's Reddit Brand Mentions now survive at a better rate than the average Reddit comment.
(The full client-facing version of this story, with AI citation results, is in our Reddit case study.)
The month Reddit almost killed the service
Here's the part I've never shared publicly.
December 2025: 50% of our comments were removed. January 2026: 74%.
We had real internal conversations about whether to kill the product entirely.
What changed in February: we stopped trying to outsmart Reddit. As our Director of Operations Muskaan put it, Reddit is a massive operation, they're smarter than us, and if you keep hunting for hacks they'll keep writing policies to shut you down.
So we became friends with the policies instead.
The new playbook: write a comment that's genuinely valuable with zero brand in it. Then, and only where it actually earns its place, integrate the brand.
Muskaan is sharing this from a stage in Shenzhen this weekend.
The monthly trendline since the pivot: 3.5% in February. 2.5% in March. A bump to 8.8% in April. Down to 2.4% in May.
Progress isn't a straight line. New niches and new subreddits get stress-tested, and some months that testing shows up in the data.
But the direction is unmistakable. I asked whether Reddit marketing was black, gray, or white hat back in #62. The deletion data has answered: white hat isn't just cleaner, it performs better.
What 411 subreddits taught us about where to show up
Most people assume brand mention work happens in a handful of giant subreddits.
Our data says the opposite. Our top 10 subreddits account for only 28% of mentions. The other 72% spreads across a long tail of 400+ communities, and about half of those have exactly one comment from us, ever.
The category mix surprised me too:
1/ Health and wellness: ~21%
2/ E-commerce and retail: ~17%
3/ Career and industry niches: ~14%
4/ Hobby and lifestyle: ~12%
5/ Finance and legal: ~10%
And marketing/SEO subreddits? 0.4%.
The places SEOs hang out are the places we post least. Your customers aren't in r/SEO. Ours are.
Small subreddits punch above their weight
If you only remember one stat from this issue, make it this one:
Comments in our long-tail niche subreddits hit 2+ upvotes 21% of the time. In our ten biggest subreddits, only 15%.
Our two most-upvoted comments ever (29 and 10 upvotes) both landed in a niche community for Australian disability service providers… not exactly r/Entrepreneur.
In a giant subreddit, your comment is fighting hundreds of others for attention. In a niche subreddit, one genuinely useful answer stands out.
How we actually pick subreddits
Our internal decision tree, in order:
1/ Relevance first. Strictly the client's category, not even adjacent topics, for the first months of a campaign.
2/ Size balance. A deliberate mix of large, medium, and small subreddits, mapped roughly to funnel stages.
3/ Test, then ban-list. Drop a small batch of comments, watch what gets removed, and ban-list the hostile subs ruthlessly. The same ban-list discipline we run in earned linkbuilding, pointed at Reddit.
4/ Know the no-go zones. Other brands' official subreddits (many run AI mod bots that auto-flag competitor names) and location subs are where mentions go to die.
Some communities officially welcome useful brand content. r/SaaS literally invites founders to share what they're building. Others will torch any brand mention, no matter how helpful it is.
Upvotes were never the point
Now the twist. The mean upvote count across all 2,670 comments is 1.2.
If this were an engagement play, it would be a terrible one. It's not an engagement play.
These are AI visibility campaigns. LLMs are starving for authentic human conversation to learn from, and Reddit is the single biggest source of it.
One comment is noise. Multiple independent discussions create signal for AI to recommend your brand.
On a recent Reddit Brand Mentions campaign, the brand went from invisible to recommended by Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, AND Reddit's own AI for its target prompts. In month one.
We've started tracking that internally as a new metric: AI recommendation speed. Roughly 30 days from zero to AI-recommended.
Deletion rate tells you whether Reddit accepts you. AI recommendation speed tells you whether it's working.
Until next week,
Greg
P.S. We just packaged our entire playbook (subreddit selection, the white-hat SOP, evidence mapping for AI search) into a free guide: The Hidden Layer of AI Search. Grab it here.