Data study
How much of Reddit is bots? About 1 in 20 posts and comments comes from a known bot, and over half of that is AutoModerator
I recently analyzed public Reddit posts and comments from October 2025 through September 2026, comparing them to a list of known bots. This allowed me to measure how much of Reddit was written by bots and which bots were responsible. I also tracked how the distribution of flagged posting has changed over time, particularly since 2019.
By Dmytro Krutytskyi, KissMyPost ResearchPublished Data through September 202613 min read
In the period from October 2025 to September 2026, the bots on my list wrote 4.48% of all comments on Reddit, or about 1 in 22 comments. AutoModerator alone accounted for 3.11% of all comments. Other accounts on the list that weren’t AutoModerator or used for moderation made up another 0.99% of comments.
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Reddit users often ask how many bots there are on the site, and the idea is a bit unsettling: to see the same post pop up in five different places at once is a little eerie. It makes you wonder who’s really on the other end of your screen.
I looked through publicly available Reddit posts and comments, about 4.6 billion of them, over the last twelve months (ending September 2026). For each author, I checked whether they appear on KissMyPost’s list of known-bots. With that information in hand, I was able to measure how much of Reddit those bot accounts produce, and I was able to identify who they are. I compared the portion of content that is written by flagged posting pipelines today versus 2019.
In this analysis, “known bot” refers to an account that looks externally automated, such as having a username like “…bot” or “…ModTeam”, comments that are all pulled from a single template, round-the-clock activity, and ads in their profile among other flags. That list of accounts is not comprehensive, so it will miss bots that write more like a human, so keep that in mind as you read the rest of this piece. Every share below represents only the bots I was able to spot, not all the bots that exist. Think of these as “detectable bots”.
What percentage of Reddit is bots?
In the period from October 2025 through September 2026, known-bot accounts were responsible for 4.48% of comments on Reddit, which works out to about 1 in 22 comments.
It’s harder to pin down what proportion of posts were written by bots, but they wrote between 3.22% and 7.76% of Reddit posts during that same period (October 2025 through September 2026), with the difference depending on how strictly the list is filtered. That gap is probably mostly due to accounts that auto-post content but aren’t otherwise identified as bots, and thus only show up in the more lenient version of the list.
The shares for comments, posts, and combined are given for the full list of known bots versus the strict list.
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. n = 4,094,958,499 comments and 534,344,145 posts, all subreddits and user profiles. Intervals show how the share moves between subreddits.
Think of this as a range rather than a single best guess.
Who are the bots on Reddit?
In comments, the list mostly surfaces moderation bots, which aren’t the kind of bot usually feared. But at the top of the list, by far, is AutoModerator, a tool configured by moderators to enforce the rules of individual subreddits.
I was able to measure its share of comments from accounts on the known-bot list, between October 2025 and September 2026, and came up with 69.4%, or about seven of every ten. (I’d guessed beforehand that it would be more than half, and it was.) I was also able to measure its share of all comments on Reddit in that window, 3.11%.
(For comparison, I also looked at the share of posts and comments from accounts on KissMyPost’s known-bot list in those same months; there, AutoModerator was 57.0%. I also included other accounts in my calculations; I found them at another 8.57% of comments from listed accounts. I was hesitant to call them “bots” in the usual sense, since I’ve never checked what they actually post.)
When I excluded AutoModerator from the calculation, the listed accounts were responsible for 1.37% of comments on Reddit during that period. When I removed both AutoModerator and accounts with words like “moderator” or “modteam” in their names from the calculation, the listed accounts were responsible for 0.99% of comments on Reddit, just under one in a hundred.
That’s the share of comments written by accounts on the known-bot list, not including AutoModerator, and not counting any accounts with words like “moderator” or “modteam” in their names. It’s not an exhaustive list of bots, and might include some people.
Here’s how the list breaks down by type:
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. n = 183,388,532 comments and 41,486,849 posts by listed accounts. Types come from the list's own classes. Intervals for posts by type are wide: auto-posting pipelines, for example, 47.2% to 60.6% of the posts by listed accounts.
Accounts that post at scheduled times to a pipeline of templates, about half (53.9%) of posts from listed accounts. That’s equal to 4.18% of posts across all of Reddit, in the same period.
Accounts that advertise within their own profile, about one tenth of those posts.
Another 29.5% of posts from listed accounts, from other accounts on the list, identified by name or commenting pattern, and left otherwise unsorted.
The list finds mostly moderation in comments, and mostly auto-posting pipelines and ads in posts. It does not check the writing of pipeline and ad accounts, nor measure the behavior of other accounts. It therefore cannot rule out the possibility of human-impersonating Reddit bots. Such bots would simply be outside what this list can find.
How many bot accounts are there on Reddit?
There are 122,785 known-bot accounts that have posted or commented at least once on Reddit in the last year, through September 2026. That’s 0.15% of all accounts that were active on Reddit during those months.
Most of these (96,384) are moderation accounts. I only counted known bots here. I counted accounts rather than people, since a person might operate several accounts, and some accounts are shared.
Which subreddits have the most bots?
I decided to define “most bots” as the subreddit with the highest share of content written by known bots. To do this, I started with the 54,149 subreddits that had at least 2,401 posts + comments in a year (October 2025 through September 2026). I found that the median subreddit had 0.33% of its content written by known bots during that time period, and 0.04% if I used the strict list of known bots instead. I also dropped adult subreddits and user profiles, then looked at the spread.
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. n = 54,149 named subreddits with enough posts and comments for a share within 2 points either way; adult subreddits and user profiles left out.
In the “tail” of this distribution, there were 724 subreddits where known bots wrote more than half the posts and comments on the subreddit. That represents 1.34% of the subreddits I measured, or 0.66% if I used the strict list of known bots instead. The biggest cases are discussed next.
| Subreddit | Posts and comments | Known-bot share | Without AutoModerator |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/automationContentCom | 1,471,285 | 99.8% | 99.8% |
| r/AutoNewspaper | 728,362 | 99.6% | 99.6% |
| r/chessquiz | 2,365,810 | 99.1% | 99.1% |
| r/tradeandgiftrequestfn | 1,230,195 | 99.0% | 98.9% |
| r/TapWord | 670,725 | 94.8% | 94.8% |
| r/NuzzleThePuzzle | 1,187,901 | 91.3% | 89.7% |
| r/NEETard | 729,413 | 80.7% | 79.1% |
| r/Pixelary | 2,444,695 | 55.1% | 55.1% |
| r/WhatIsMyCQS | 708,223 | 46.4% | 0.1% |
| r/Watchexchange | 1,278,319 | 44.5% | 5.5% |
| r/IntrovertsChat | 653,024 | 37.2% | 3.2% |
| r/fragranceswap | 693,697 | 32.2% | 9.9% |
Adult subreddits left out. A high share doesn't make a subreddit bad: in several of these, one app or service account does most of the writing.
I looked up the names of the busiest known-bot accounts in each of the ten subreddits, and here’s what I found; keep in mind that my judgments are based solely on the names:
r/chessquiz and r/Pixelary both seem to be game-like applications, r/tradeandgiftrequestfn seems to be a swap bot, and r/AutoNewspaper seems to be part of a news-pipeline. I haven’t checked what these bots actually post, nor have I checked who writes content in r/automationContentCom.
Some of the subreddits on this list are only on it because of the presence of a single account. For example, r/WhatIsMyCQS is almost entirely shared by AutoModerator, with just 0.1% coming from anything else. Similarly, there are four subreddits where AutoModerator makes up the majority of the share, and a very sharp drop when you remove it from the calculation. I also tallied the number of subreddits, to give a bigger picture sense of what’s going on.
Try itPosts last month for a subreddit you pick, with the share from known bots: Subreddits
Are there more bots on Reddit than before?
This is the most wanted question, but also the hardest one. The comment and name rules I used to build this list are based on the last year of activity, so there’s a good chance that this list is missing any bots that have been quiet for some time. The posting rules go back further (to July 2018), but were tuned on more recent data (September 2026). So I didn’t bother running a backward version of today’s list, since it would have mostly measured the list rather than Reddit.
Still, if you want a narrower yardstick, here’s one that’s uniformly applied to every month: accounts with a hundred posts or more in that month, also flagged by the above shared criteria (templated posting, all-hours activity, ads in profile, etc.). Then the percentage they constituted of total monthly sharing.
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. Same thresholds in every month; n = 13,107,215 to 52,094,224 posts a month. No data for July to October 2023. March to June 2023 has spikes, 28.3% in April and 20.1% in June, that I didn't investigate.
On this measure, share declined, the opposite of what I expected. Accounts with at least 100 posts in a given month, and flagged by the above shared criteria (templated or nonstop posting, profile ads, Reddit system accounts). They averaged 14.4% of Reddit posts in an average month in 2019, then dropped to 5.78% in an average month from October 2025 through September 2026. The first six months of 2023 saw some erratic swings. Then a decline through 2024, with minor fluctuations thereafter.
I compared whole years, so these are numbers rather than shares. I did find that flagged accounts were responsible for around 34.5 million posts in 2019, and around 30.9 million in the 12 months to September 2026. In contrast, all posts in my data increased from around 236 million to around 534 million. So in raw terms, the volume of flagged content declined, while my overall data more than doubled in size.
I have never checked how comprehensive the 2019 data is.
There’s a caveat from earlier in the period: ten accounts were responsible for 52.1% of all flagged posts during a typical month. If I drop those ten biggest posters each month, I get a smaller decline (from 6.55% to 4.11%), but the decline is still there, and it’s robust across every variant I tried.
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. Accounts with 100+ posts in the month that tripped the posting rules; 12 months per group. Intervals are a bootstrap over months.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that there are still some accounts that are prolific posters each month, whether they’re flagged or not, and they’ve maintained an approximately constant share of Reddit over time. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer bots overall on Reddit, just that the proportion of posts coming through the flagged posting pipelines has shrunk over time.
I can’t say for sure why the share of flagged content dropped, but one unmeasured cause could be that there were fewer templated pipelines around. Or the pipelines were less templated, and so today’s rules don’t catch them. Or Reddit just banned them faster. These can’t necessarily be disentangled.
The rules used to flag content in this article are based on September 2026, so earlier years are judged by today’s standards.
Who writes the most on Reddit: known bots or everyone else?
AutoModerator is far and away the commenter with the most comments on Reddit, with 127,152,359 comments during October 2025 through September 2026, 84× the number of comments made by the account in second place. But the share of bots declines rapidly as you go further down the ranking.
Source: KissMyPost analysis of public Reddit posts and comments. Accounts ranked by comments or by posts in the window. Wilson 95% intervals over accounts; each top-N list is an exact count, so the bars show how far the share could differ in a similar group.
I took Reddit’s top 10,000 commenters between October 2025 and September 2026 and looked them up against the list of known bots. 7.73% of them were a match. I could see the bot share declining as I went further down the list, but I didn’t bother to measure it past the top 10,000.
The top of this is probably worth taking with a grain of salt. Comment rules are only enforced on accounts that post a thousand comments or more, so the busiest ones are probably the easiest ones to catch. Even so, the strict list alone gets you 62 of the top commenters.
Going further down the list, the posters get weaker and the strict list alone still gets you 30 of the busiest 100 posters, 140 of the busiest 1,000. The rest are caught by the posting rules.
So how much of Reddit is bots?
If you take the list of accounts on KissMyPost’s known-bot list, then about one in 20 posts and comments on Reddit from October 2025 through September 2026 were made by an account on that list. That number ranges from 3.9% to 4.9%, depending on how strict the list is, and over half of that is AutoModerator. Across all comments by those accounts, about seven in ten are AutoModerator. But how many accounts are passing themselves off as human? That’s a separate question, and it needs a different method.
What this data can't tell you
| Limit | Why |
|---|---|
| Floor, not ceiling | Think of it as an approximate floor for how much is automated, not a ceiling. The list contains only the bots that I know about, but could also include some people. A stricter version of this list would result in a smaller share. |
| Bots that pass as people | It also doesn't include more sophisticated accounts that are hard to detect, such as undetectable human-sounding bots, language-model-run accounts, karma farms that post different text to each submission, and accounts that were sold or hacked. |
| Window the list was built on | The year I measured falls within the build window of the list, so it's likely that the list sees less outside of that range, but the extent of which is unmeasured. That's why I'm not showing the older list shares as a trend. |
| Templated commenters | Some commenters on the list were templated (e.g., hosting raffles), and while they're probably false positives on the list, I haven't checked them personally to confirm. I don't have data on how complete this window is. |
| Posts and comments, not people | It tallies only posts and comments, not views or traffic or people. It's silent on what share of reading is produced by bots. It covers everything that was posted, including things that were later removed, and things posted from a user's profile, so it's broader than what readers see in their view. Adult-content posts aren't called out separately, so the share of posts might be different without them. |
| Most active accounts | It lists the most active accounts, which is in part a consequence of how the result set is constructed. The rules for comments only flag accounts, not individual comments, and require a minimum of a thousand comments. |
| By-year check | The by-year check uses templated pipelines, and so has a consistent set of thresholds every month; those thresholds were calibrated on September 2026 data. Back in 2019, ten accounts were responsible for about half of the flagged posts. The monthly series is missing July through October 2023, but shows spikes in March through June 2023. Those spikes are 28.3% in April and 20.1% in June, neither of which has been investigated. |
| Comments, posts, intervals | Comments hits largely on moderation tools and apps. Posts is driven primarily by ads and automated posting pipelines. Intervals here show differences between subreddits, rather than differences between strict and full lists, so don't capture misclassification. For posts, and posts + comments combined, the difference between the strict and full lists is larger than the uncertainty. |
Method
| Step | What |
|---|---|
| Data | For this analysis, I used data from October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026. In that time, I tallied 4,094,958,499 comments and 534,344,145 posts. I included all subreddits and profile types in my calculations, did not attempt to determine how complete my window was, and left [deleted] authors in my overall counts. I considered accounts listed on KissMyPost's bot list, version 1.4.0, to be known bots. I took both high and medium confidence entries, last added October 22, 2026, and counted the entire account. |
| Known bots | I also included rules that cover accounts with “bot” or “ModTeam” at the end of their name, templated or all-day commenting, monthly posting pipelines, and profile advertisements. Plus, I used a curated list of known-bots (some of which were added after a human reviewed the account) from 2026. A separate October 2026 audit relied on two automated reviewers. It excluded accounts involved in moderation and accounts that could only be caught by looking at commenting patterns. There was no account-by-account manual review, so I can't measure the accuracy of this audit, and any bots it missed are not counted here. |
| Shares and intervals | The reported shares carry 95% intervals; subreddits were considered a “cluster” for these calculations, so they include both comments and posts to the subreddit. Using a more restrictive list of accounts yields 4.01% comments, 3.22% posts, and 3.92% overall. |
| Without AutoModerator | Without AutoModerator, there were 1.37% comments, 7.59% posts, and 2.09% overall. |
| Accounts | There were 122,785 accounts on the list who were active in this period, out of 82,908,528 who wrote something during it. Of those, 96,384 were moderator accounts. |
| Subreddits | These only include named subreddits, not profiles or “adult” ones. There was enough activity for about ±2 point precision per share; these are medians from 1,000 bootstrap resamples of subreddits. |
| Top accounts | Top accounts by number of comments or posts, with Wilson 95% intervals. |
| By-year yardstick | The yearly measure counts posts from accounts that posted at least 100 times in any given month of the year. Those accounts also tripped rules meant to identify accounts operated by bots that automatically post content (auto-posters), accounts used for advertising, and accounts operated by Reddit itself. The thresholds were the same every month, from July 2018 through September 2026. There is no data available for July through October 2023. Years were averaged from monthly values, with bootstrap intervals across months, but 2023 was excluded from the yearly means. |
Planned before looking, and found while analysing
| Item | What |
|---|---|
| Hypotheses | Before looking at the results, I’d set myself six hypotheses. I found that AutoModerator appeared near the top of the list of accounts, and that it accounted for more than half of its comments, held, 69.4%. |
| Found while analysing | The authorship of the content in the twelve subreddits with the highest share is also shown. |
| Review | Comments alongside posts; the strict list alongside the full list; the share of content held by the top ten accounts in each month (the 2019 share); the sixth hypothesis dropped, because the second half, that the listed accounts write many times their share of the site’s content, couldn’t be fairly benchmarked. |
Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.
Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.
Questions people ask (FAQ)
What percentage of Reddit comments are from bots?
I counted how many accounts on KissMyPost’s known-bot list commented on Reddit, during October 2025 through September 2026, and found that they wrote about 4.48% of comments. That’s about 1 in 22, and I got 4.01% when I used the strict list instead. I didn’t count accounts that looked like bots but weren’t on the list, so those aren’t included here.
The data
| Item | What |
|---|---|
| Files | I have packaged the data into eight CSV files: bot-written share for comments, posts, and combined; split by using full versus strict bot list; and broken down by type of bot. I also included a yardstick of posts by month, including versions for both 2019 and the most recent year of data. There’s also a histogram of subreddit shares, the twelve subreddits with the largest share of bot-written content, and the number of known bots in the most active accounts. |
| Format | I stored the shares as fractions (rather than percentages) with values from 0 to 1, and I excluded the text of any posts or the usernames of individual writers. |
| License | I released this data under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0); if you find it useful in your work, please credit “KissMyPost” and include a link to the page. |
- CSVShare written by known botsShare of Reddit comments, posts and both written by accounts on the list of known bots, with counts and 95% intervals, October 2025 to September 2026, for the full list (high and medium confidence); the strict list is in a separate file.
- CSVShare written by known bots, strict listThe same shares for the strict list (high confidence only), with counts and 95% intervals, October 2025 to September 2026; these are the blue rings on the main chart.
- CSVKnown bots by typeShare of comments and of posts by listed accounts that each type of account wrote: AutoModerator, moderator team accounts, pipelines, ads and other listed accounts.
- CSVFlagged posting pipelines by monthMonthly share of Reddit posts by accounts that tripped the posting rules, July 2018 to September 2026, with the number of posts each month.
- CSVSubreddits by known-bot shareNumber of subreddits in each 5-point bin of known-bot share, October 2025 to September 2026.
- CSVPosting yardstick, four ways of countingMean monthly share of Reddit posts by flagged accounts in 2019 and from October 2025 to September 2026, in four versions, with 95% intervals over months.
- CSVLargest subreddits with the highest shareThe subreddits with the highest known-bot share among the 1,000 with the most posts and comments, with and without AutoModerator.
- CSVKnown bots among the most active accountsKnown bots among the top 100, 1,000 and 10,000 accounts by comments and by posts.
- PNGMain chart (PNG)Share of comments and posts written by known bots, as an image.
Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24141580
Check your own subreddit
See when your subreddit is most active, what gets posts removed and who writes there.
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About the data
KissMyPost is a Reddit analytics tool: it reads a subreddit's history (posts, comments, removals, rules) and tells you when to post, what format works and who writes there. This study uses the same data: public Reddit posts and comments back to 2005.
What KissMyPost does
About the author
Dmytro Krutytskyi is the founder of KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. He studies what online communities talk about, who writes in them and how audiences overlap, and writes up what the data shows here, with the method and the numbers. Questions about the data, or need a cut we didn't publish? Write to him directly.
Cite this study
Krutytskyi, D. (2026). How much of Reddit is bots? About 1 in 20 posts and comments comes from a known bot, and over half of that is AutoModerator. KissMyPost Research. https://kissmypost.com/research/how-much-of-reddit-is-bots
Data: Krutytskyi, D. (2026). Share of Reddit posts and comments written by known bots, 2025-2026 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24141580