We helped 6 devtool SaaS get cited on Reddit without being banned. The 3 rules we never break.
Disclosure: I work in devtools and ran this experiment across 6 portfolio brands over the last 4 months. All 6 are now showing up in Perplexity citations on category-level prompts. Two are showing up in ChatGPT. None got shadow-banned. Sharing the rules because there's a lot of bad advice circulating.
Rule 1: Never post about your own product. Ever.
The accounts that do the citation work answer 30+ questions in their target subreddits before they ever mention anything related to a product they're affiliated with. When they finally do mention it, it's in a thread where someone explicitly asked 'what tools have you tried for X' — and even then it's mentioned alongside 2-3 competitors with honest tradeoffs.
Rule 2: Solve the question the OP actually asked, not the question that would let you mention your product.
The single most common spam pattern: OP asks 'how do I parse JSON in Rust', spammer answers 'great question, I've been using [product] which handles JSON beautifully'. Mods catch this in 30 seconds. We require a substantive answer to the literal question first, then product mention only if it's genuinely the best fit.
Rule 3: One mention per thread, never two.
If the product gets mentioned naturally by someone else later in the thread, the planted account does NOT pile on. The pattern of 'OP mentions tool, then 3 accounts confirm it within 4 hours' is the most reliable shadow-ban trigger we've seen.
Following these, Perplexity citation rate on category prompts climbed 0-3% over 6 weeks on every brand we ran it on. It is slow. It is real.
Not a playbook for everyone — only works if you have someone willing to do real community participation. If you're looking for a shortcut, this isn't it.
2 replies
- Jess Wright
Adding rule 4 from our own attempts: never link to anything on the first product mention. A bare brand name reads as recommendation; a brand name plus a link reads as marketing. Perplexity seems to weight bare-name mentions higher than linked ones for whatever reason. Sample size of 2 campaigns but the difference was visible.
Rule 1 is the one most people ignore and it's why most attempts fail. We've watched two agencies try the 'planted account' route and both got their accounts nuked within 8 weeks. The 30-questions-before-mentioning ratio sounds extreme until you realize it's basically the same patience curve real community members hit before they share their first product recommendation. If you can't fund that ramp, don't run the play.