Here is how to promote on Reddit without getting banned, in short: spend your first weeks commenting helpfully with zero links, read each subreddit's rules before posting, keep self-promotion to a small fraction of your activity, and mention your product only where it genuinely answers the question, with a disclosure that it is yours. Reddit's official spam policy allows promotion; what gets you banned is an account that exists mostly to post links to your own thing. The stakes changed in 2026. Reddit's share of Google's top 3 results hit 10.24 percent after the May core update, and its share of AI-generated answers roughly doubled in eight months, per SE Ranking's study. A ban no longer costs you one subreddit. It costs you the platform AI search quotes when people ask what to buy.
This guide covers the written rules (Reddit's actual spam and ban evasion policies, quoted from the source), the unwritten ones (the 90/9/1 rhythm, the karma floors subreddits never publish, why your first post should contain no link at all), what moderators remove on sight, whether Reddit can follow you across new accounts when you try to come back, and whether $10 a day of Reddit ads beats risking your organic account. None of it requires growth hacks, and all of it assumes you have a real product that genuinely helps someone. It is written for a founder doing their own marketing, probably at 11pm, who wants the traffic without waking up to a suspension notice.