How to Detect AI on Reddit - Fighting the Bots
Reddit has become a primary search destination because users want helpful information from real people, rather than generic information.
For now, Google’s core updates favor Reddit. There is one problem with this, though: LLMs are increasingly being used to flood subreddits with “mention activity” and citations. Both of these things are designed to boost the search visibility of a particular brand, individual, or entity.
If you’re trying to detect AI on Reddit, you don’t have to rely on a gut feeling. We will cover manual linguistic tells for AI detection on Reddit and go over how the Pangram Chrome Extension provides an instant verification layer for any post.
Why is AI Content Spiking on Reddit?
Reddit is a high-authority platform for “mention activity” - users mentioning a specific brand, individual, or entity. AI content is spiking on Reddit because brands and spammers use LLMs to create artificial social proof and cite specific products to influence search rankings. Doing so is meant to bring more people to their products
Cornell University released a study called “AI Rules? Characterizing Reddit Community Policies Towards AI-Generated Content to evaluate how popular subreddits are responding to the wave of AI-generated content.
The study analyzed 300,000+ subreddits and found that rules explicitly addressing AI more than doubled in one year (from July 2023 to Nov 2024). For example, the subreddit r/writing states in their rules: No Generative AI: r/writing is a place for human-created writing. AI slop has no place here.
This rapid increase strongly suggests widespread, repeated incidents of AI misuse, not a hypothetical concern. This AI content erodes community trust and leads to users receiving advice from bots, rather than actual people with experience.
Linguistic Tells: How to Spot a Reddit AI Bot
You can spot a Reddit AI bot by looking for these linguistic tells: a lack of variation regarding the sentence length within a post/comment and an overuse of transition-phrases like “It’s important to remember” or “In conclusion.”
Even though AI is becoming more sophisticated, many Reddit bots fail to produce content with the burstiness - variations in sentence length - featured in human-written content, And, they frequently overuse transition phrases.
On top of that, many AI models often over-rely on specific vocabulary. Some of this vocabulary includes words like “delve,” “tapestry,” and “nuance,” which are statistically overrepresented in AI writing due to their training data.
When it comes to AI detection, Reddit posts/comments that are overly polite, neutral, or structured with perfect bullet points should be considered suspicious. This is especially true if it was posted in a community with casual, slang-heavy, or opinionated discourse.
The Stealth Problem: "Humanized" Reddit Spam
Many spammers rely on software to humanize the AI-generated text they post. Using this software can bypass basic AI detection filters, but it often fails to remove the underlying structural patterns that high-accuracy AI detectors, like Pangram, can identify. A post/comment might seem human, yet “off,” which could be a sign of AI.
To determine if a Reddit post/comment was AI-generated, you can see if it references the following: current events that are relevant to the community it was posted in, or specific community knowledge that a real person belonging to that community would naturally include. If it doesn’t, it might be AI-generated.
How to Detect AI on Reddit with One Click
The most reliable way to verify Reddit content is to use the Pangram AI Detection Chrome Extension. Using the Pangram Chrome Extension lets you highlight any comment or post and then receive an instant AI probability score without leaving that Reddit page. Some sub-reddits like r/HFY have partnered with Pangram to help automate their AI detection capabilities.
AI Detector Extension In Action
For example, if you see a Reddit comment that seems like AI, you can highlight it. And, then, you can view Pangram’s “AI Likelihood Score” to see if the text was likely generated by ChatGPT-5, Claude, or Gemini.
You can install the Pangram Chrome Extension by clicking on the “Add to Chrome” button found at this link. Doing so will let you pin the extension to your browser. You can detect AI on Reddit, with the Pangram Chrome Extension, by highlighting a thread/comment to see its “AI Likelihood Score.”
Unlike other AI detectors, Pangram is 99.98% accurate. And, also unlike any other Reddit AI checker, Pangram can detect “mixed” content, which is content that was generated by AI and then edited by a person.
Why You Need More than Just a "Bot Detector"
If you are on Reddit and you use a standard bot detector to see if a post/comment was AI-generated, this bot detector will look at the account that made this post/comment. Looking at this metadata can sometimes reveal if that account is a bot. But many accounts that post AI content look real. This is why you need more than just a bot detector.
Pangram analyzes the linguistic DNA of a post/comment. Analyzing this linguistic DNA lets Pangram detect AI-generated content even if the accounts look real.
Even though Pangram is 99.98% accurate with its AI detection, you may want to employ a hybrid approach. Use the Pangram Chrome Extension to flag a post/comment, then check the account’s history. If this user is frequently posting long, perfectly formatted advice across a multitude of different subreddits, they are likely using an LLM.
Resist the Bots
The value of Reddit lies in its human authenticity. This human authenticity is being challenged as LLM-assisted content continues to spread across the platform.
Users must take a proactive, diagnostic approach to the information they engage with. Tools like the Chrome extension empower users to verify social media content in real time, helping preserve the integrity of online communities.
Verify Reddit content instantly with the click of a button.
to our updates
