Press · ETBrandEquity
Brands want Reddit. They just don't get it!
ETBrandEquity on why brands want into Reddit now that AI assistants cite it - with our co-founder on why automated seeding gets caught.
What the piece covers
ETBrandEquity reports the rush of Indian brands into Reddit now that assistants lean on it for answers. Reddit is the single largest source of LLM citations at 40%, per Semrush as cited in the article, and brands across D2C, auto, fintech, edtech and nutraceuticals are asking agencies to get them in. The piece follows what happens next: banned accounts, shadow bans and a new market of Redditors for hire.
Our co-founder Viren Inaniyan is the voice on why the shortcuts fail. The article carries his view, as reported speech, that Reddit is still a very human-driven platform and that automated commenting rarely survives because moderators read the account's overall behaviour rather than the individual comment. His two on-record lines make the operational point: varying the text does not help if the account-level pattern is unnatural, and seeding at scale still needs a real person behind every post.
The article describes us as an AI-search visibility and monitoring platform, spelt Tru Commerce. The agency voices (TheSmallBigIdea, Growth Hackers Digital, Reddify.me) and a Reddit spokesperson land where we do: build, do not sell, and treat Reddit as a long game rather than something to hack for placement in AI answers.
On the record
“You can mix the comments and make them different, but if the account-level pattern is unnatural, Reddit can still rate-limit, remove the comments, or ban the account.”
Viren Inaniyan, co-founder - on why automated commenting fails against Reddit's account-level moderation
“It's not possible to automate seeding of content at scale on Reddit. Even if the response is unique for every thread, you still need a genuine human to copy-paste it,”
On why agencies cannot run Reddit at scale without real people behind the accounts