Affiliate funnel.
The post is a glowing review of a tool. The link is a referral kickback.
What it looks like
Affiliate funnels weaponize Reddit's "real-people-recommend" credibility for paid placements. The structure is consistent: a post that reads like a genuine "X changed my life" testimonial, a link in the body or in a top comment, and a chorus of supposedly-independent commenters chiming in with the same recommendation.
The link is almost always a redirect, a `?ref=` parameter, or a bare domain that the post owner gets a kickback from. The supporting comments are pre-arranged accounts or pay-per-comment gig workers. The whole post is an ad with social proof bolted on.
How the scanner catches it
- Every outbound link in the post body and the top-voted comments is checked for redirect chains, `?ref=`, `?aff=`, `?utm_*` affiliate parameters, and known affiliate platforms (Impact, ShareASale, ClickBank, Refersion).
- All-praise patterns are flagged: a thread where 8 of 10 commenters say variants of "I use this too, life-changing" with no actual specifics gets called out as too-clean engagement.
- Stylometric matching across the praise comments often surfaces sockpuppet-cluster fingerprints (the same idiosyncratic punctuation across different usernames).
Surface markers
Exact phrases and patterns the scanner reads as evidence. These aren’t sufficient on their own — a real-person comment can sound this way too — but they push the verdict toward the pattern when they cluster with the structural flags above.
Where it shows up
Paste the Reddit post URL into the scanner. If this is the playbook, the report will name it explicitly and surface the evidence above.
Open the scanner