Agentic Astroturfing Hits Reddit, UI Bakery Campaign Discovered

Agentic astroturfing is here. Companies are using AI to engagement-farm and boost their brand on Reddit. For some brands, the vast majority of mentions are coming from obvious bot accounts. It can be hard to spot at first, because the mentions are spread across multiple subreddits and from multiple accounts. But if you follow certain keywords closely, patterns begin to emerge.

Take UI Bakery for example. Search for the top posts in the last month, and you’ll see quite a few things in common with all the OP’s profiles:

• New accounts, usually 3-6 months old
• ~500-2k karma (at time of UI Bakery post)
• Post history:
  • A few, low-effort, high karma posts; usually cat pics or British memes
  • Account reaches ~500-2k karma, then
  • Posts about UI Bakery
• UI Bakery Post
  • Always mentions a competitor to leverage their brand authority
  • Tends to tell a story of problem ⇒ UI Bakery solution
  • Often mentions the competitor product didn't work for them

Let me be clear: I’m not calling out UI Bakery, the company. This could be a 3rd party contractor they hired that decided to use a shady approach, or a misguided junior employee acting on their own. I doubt the entire team is aware and involved. In any case, someone is artificially boosting the UI Bakery brand name on Reddit.

Now, what are the chances that the top 5 posts in the last month mentioning UI Bakery all just happen to be from new accounts that fit this pattern of cat-pic karma-farmer turned UI Bakery fan? Actually there were a lot more than 5, but a few of the accounts have been banned already.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pwa0ap/how_i_stopped_letting_people_poke_the_database/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1q1vvt0/my_new_year_vibe_coding_resolution_fewer/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/1pqxp2n/how_are_you_exposing_safe_edit_access_to_business/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/comments/1q6er7h/no_code_stopped_me_from_lying_to_myself_about_my/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/comments/1prdiqc/which_no_code_tools_actually_survived_after_your/

When I saw the evidence beginning to disappear, I figured I should grab screenshots now.

NOTE: When I first noticed this pattern, all of the accounts were under 2k karma, but their posts have been successful and by the time I got screenshots they are all more like 2k-4k.

There's more where that came from, but I think that's enough to make the point that these look like bot accounts.

Next, let's look at the structure and phrasing of the posts themselves.

Disclaimer: The following section is ChatGPT's analysis of these posts. The rest of this blog post is 100% my words. I don't use AI to write, but I did use it to analyze the posts and find further patterns.

<START CHATGPT>

Identical macro-structure (this is the tell)

Nearly every post follows the same five-block skeleton, even when the topic differs:

Block 1 — Relatable frustration hook (1–2 short paragraphs)

• “I kept running into…”
• “I finally got tired of…”
• “For years we’ve been…”

Purpose: establish authenticity + pain.

Block 2 — Stakes escalation (single paragraph)

• Mentions risk, scale, or organizational pressure
• “non-technical users”
• “business stakeholders”
• “production data”
• “I didn’t want to be the bottleneck”

This creates justification for a “real” solution.

Block 3 — Competitor name-drop (brief, dismissive)

This is extremely consistent:

• Retool / Appsmith / internal scripts / spreadsheets / generic no-code
• Framed as:
  • “We tried X but…”
  • “X worked until it didn’t”
  • “X was fine, but not for this case”

Not angry, not detailed — just enough to borrow authority and move on.

Block 4 — UI Bakery introduction (center of gravity)

Always:

• Introduced after the failure
• Framed as discovery, not recommendation
• Positioned as:
  • flexible
  • internal-tool-focused
  • “let me sleep at night”
  • “gave non-technical users access safely”

This section is the longest and most concrete.

Block 5 — Soft close + discussion bait

Ends with:

• Reflection, not CTA
• “Curious how others handle this”
• “Would love to hear what people are doing”
• “Maybe this helps someone”

Classic engagement-farming ending.

This structure is too consistent to be coincidence, especially across banned/new accounts.

</END CHATGPT>

So now what?

Does this mean their plan failed? We did it, Reddit?!

No. Not yet, at least.

For now, whoever is behind this campaign has generated multiple, high-engagement posts boosting UI Bakery's brand, which will likely be ingested into LLM training data, and cited as sources in AI chats. Some of the accounts involved have already been banned, but enough of these posts remain live that they will likely achieve their goal of artificially boosting UI Bakery's brand in AI search.

So by that measure, I would say this campaign is working quite well.

This is just the beginning

Reddit became one of the most valuable platforms for advertising because users trusted it. That trust came from strong communities with decentralized moderation that surfaced valuable content. But that trust is being eroded by bad actors attempting to manipulate public opinion for financial gain, and replace that content with AI slop.

There's a deep irony here: abusing a system known for trust, in order to deceive others for financial gain, only to destroy the system and trust that made it valuable in the first place.

And once that trust is gone, no one wins: not users, not platforms, not even the companies trying to game it.