In words wrapped in humor and significance, Reddit
CEO Steve Huffman, aka u/spez, published a post last week outlining
the company's new labeling system for bots, expanded spam removal, and selective human verification measures.
Reddit removes about 100,000 bot accounts per day. The post does not estimate how
many ad impressions may have been delivered or lost to non-human traffic, but emphasizes that the site will continue to focus on human-first interaction as it seeks to offer higher-quality
engagement among rising AI-content concerns.
Huffman wrote: "Humans welcome (bots must wear name tags)." The company has implemented four actions. A new [App] label for accounts
that use automation in ways permitted by the platform lets developers who register their applications make it visible to any user interacting with those accounts.
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Reddit also will continue to
remove spam and bot content, and will make selective human verification for accounts exhibiting suspicious automated behavior, and improved tools for users to report suspected bots.
Reddit generated $726 million from advertising in the final calendar quarter of 2025.
If bots become indistinguishable from real users, Reddit’s "human-first" reputation becomes the
challenge, threatening the platform's biggest selling point to advertisers. Unless advertisers want to sell to agentic bots.
At the end of 2025, Reddit launched verified profiles for brands,
publishers, and creators.
These features, with grey checkmarks, are displayed across profiles, communities, feeds, post detail pages, and search results. The checkmarks verify profiles,
addressing the question of who is behind an account. The [App] label addresses whether it is a machine operating on behalf of a registered developer.
“If we
need to verify an account is human, we’ll do it in a privacy-first way,” Huffman wrote. “Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The
goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.”
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin
said with the speed at which AI continues to grow, AI bot traffic will exceed the amount of online human traffic by 2027.
"If a human did a task, like shop for a digital camera, [he or she]
might go to five websites, but an agent might go to 1,000-times, maybe 5,000, and that's real traffic and load." he said. "The use of the internet will explode in the next five years."
Companies will need to invent new technologies to support all this traffic, he said. Ideally, companies will want agentic technology to build the code, sometimes in the process of doing a task on
the fly -- millions of times per second -- create and teardown code.
It’s all part of developing a new internet and advertising network for brands.