Check a subreddit's rules before you post (with AI)

Reddit is where a lot of your audience talks honestly, and moderators work hard to keep it that way. The fastest way to waste a good post is to break a rule you didn’t read. Rules differ a lot from one subreddit to the next, and the strictest ones are often in the biggest communities.

A real run: r/Entrepreneur

On 27 October 2026 we asked for r/Entrepreneur’s rules. It has 5.3 million members and five rules. Three of them would catch a typical brand post:

• Rule 1, no promotion: “Do not use this community to sell, promote, recruit, hire, job-seek, solicit investment, or drive traffic to your profile, company, or external content.” It adds: “Violations may result in a permanent ban.”
• Rule 3, earn it first: “You must participate in the comments of other posts on this subreddit before posting yourself.”
• Rule 4, human content: “AI-generated posts or comments are not permitted.”

So in r/Entrepreneur you can’t link to your product, you can’t post as a newcomer, and you shouldn’t paste in an AI draft. What you can do is share a specific, practical experience, which rule 3 asks for directly: posts must be “grounded in real entrepreneurial effort.”

Another example, r/socialmedia: its rule 5 asks people to “refrain from unsolicited self-promotion or driving traffic to personal channels”, and rule 3 removes one-line questions such as “best scheduling tool?”. The subreddit check recipe shows that run.

The prompt

Use Scrollhound to read the rules of r/<subreddit> and its top posts from the past month.

Tell me what's allowed and what gets removed (quote the rule each time), whether self-promotion or
links are allowed and how, whether AI-written posts are allowed, and what the top posts have in
common (format, length, tone). Then check this draft against the rules and say what to change:
<paste your draft>

Quote the rules exactly and link the posts you mention. If a rule is unclear, say so.

Why ask an AI instead of reading the sidebar

You can read the rules yourself, and for one subreddit you should. The AI helps when you’re choosing between ten subreddits for a launch, or a client wants to know which communities allow links at all. It reads every set of rules, quotes the relevant line, and adds what the top posts look like, which the rules alone don’t tell you.

Then write it yourself

Use the check to decide where and what to post, then write in your own voice. The communities that ban AI posts can usually tell, and the ones that don’t still reward posts that sound like a person who did the thing.

Set it up by adding Scrollhound to Claude or ChatGPT. For what to post about, see Reddit customer research with Claude.