Covert advertising and its takeover of social media

You are not immune to advertising.

It’s through no fault of your own, either. Advertisers figured out quite some time ago that natural sounding promotion from people that viewers are familiar with are more effective than regular, billboard-on-the-wall advertisements. Thus, advertisements like YouTube sponsorships and Instagram influencer promotion posts came to be. These, at least, are required to be disclosed to the viewer. But when this conclusion is pulled to its logical extreme, it can result in a type of advertising called covert advertising. Covert advertising is undisclosed advertising that tries to pass itself off as genuine praise about a product or service.

Perhaps you have heard of a band called Geese. Their marketing was very much not announced to the viewer. As Eliza McLamb and The Wired reported, the band hired a PR agency called Chaotic Good to create social media posts that seemed to be from fans to boost the popularity of it. In fact, they created hundreds of posts with Geese’s songs playing in the background, or song lyric quotes, or more. This advertising worked incredibly well. Chaotic Good’s work started in 2021, and by 2025, Geese’s new album made the top 10 charts and their tours sold out.

Geese’s case has been a publicly visible case where we know the exact company responsible and the company that had requested these services. But, had someone not noticed this on Chaotic Good’s website, we wouldn’t even know that. What about all of the cases we don’t know about?

Several of these cases are on Reddit. In fact, Reddit has been flooded with covert advertising for years. The typical format of this is simple: a post asks for a recommendation on a certain kind of product, and commenters flood the post with brand and item recommendations repeatedly. These commenters, of course, are not real. The same few brands are posted repeatedly.

As an example, let’s look at the below thread, which asks for good powerbanks to purchase:

Here are a handful of the replies:

In fact, about 35% of the top level comments mention Anker. Three of those note the exact capacity of the powerbank. This is a little suspicious. We can’t prove these to be spam, but there is a poster further down the thread that we can absolutely prove to be spam:

This is the thread (or tread, as they call it) that lanegarcia1 links to:

The post above is by a different user called cularparti, and it looks as suspicious as can be! cularparti’s other posts otherwise look normal, featuring random memes and questions. But, randomly, they’ll make posts just like the above about various topics, such as gaming laptops and earbuds.

When you click into the links, they all point towards a website called Quizience. I would like to make an editorial note that the website is poorly made. The social media links on it don’t work, the copyright date lists the wrong year, and not a single real name is listed on the website. Despite that, let’s check out their article on “The 6 Best Gaming Laptops of 2025 Recommended by Reddit Users”, which recommends this laptop:

Right away, we see a contradiction: The title of the post says that the laptops were recommended by Reddit users, but this text claims that the laptop was tested in-house. But, without any testing methodology, metrics, real names, or anything at all, this was almost certainly not tested. The article itself is fluff. Every “check price on Amazon” button throughout the site is an affiliate link. Affiliate links make it so the owner of the link receives a small commission of the product the link directs to. So, if someone did buy a gaming laptop through Quizience’s Amazon link, Quizience gets a percent of that sale back. This site likely almost entirely profits off of the use of affiliate links.

For your own purposes, you can tell if a link is an Amazon affiliate link by looking within the URL for a tag= section. Walmart, AliExpress, eBay, Target, Etsy, and Rakuten also all have similar affiliate programs.

For the sake of demonstration, we will go back to the original poster that led us to this thread. We see that most of their posting is about cats:

This is very typical for spam accounts. Almost all spam or advertisement accounts mix their spamming activity with regular posts to avoid getting banned from social media platforms. This is typically done by either AI-generating responses to threads, or by posting generic comments to high-traffic subreddits. This account seems to be an example of the latter. By posting low effort comments on pet subreddits, this account can raise its reputation with minimal effort. Then, in between comments on cat posts, they can post spam threads with links to Quizience. These two users are a part of a web of at least ten accounts associated with this website (I stopped counting at this point for my own sake).

It is extremely difficult to pick apart normal accounts from spam accounts, so I’ve picked the most obvious examples that I can. In fact, this case is a bit different because, rather than directly coming from a company, it comes from someone who affiliate farms. That is, they create and spread mass amounts of affiliate links to take a bit of commission.

But now, I need to show you the abyss. What does it look like when a company directly boosts their own products? This is much harder to verify, but we do know that it is happening through the existence of several companies. Signals, Outpost, and ReplyGuy are all examples of “organic Reddit marketing agencies” that deliberately post AI comments to promote companies. Signals goes as far as blatantly using bot accounts, sells high-karma Reddit accounts, and even offers downvoting services to demote a competitor’s thread. Take this quote from their front page:

Reddit ranks on early upvote velocity. Without a push in the first hour, a good post drops off the feed and never gets the chance to compound. We deliver that early velocity from aged accounts, on the delivery speed you choose.

But, even more egregiously, Signals actually lists several companies on their main page:

These companies are Magnolia Pictures, LeadDyno, 1inch Network, Spray, Escape, PolkaBridge, and… Anker! Perhaps this makes you raise your eyebrow. It certainly made me raise mine, so I emailed Anker asking them to clarify their usage of Signals. I have very unfortunately not received a reply to my email, but I would certainly love to know if Anker does this sort of marketing or not for sure. If you have time, email pr@anker.com. Maybe your email will get a response.

To be fair to these companies, their logos showing on this page is no proof that they have purchased services from Signal. When a company is based around deceiving others, it is fair to assume that they may deceive others themselves about what companies have used their services. However, Anker’s lack of reply is a worrying sign of its own.

The problem extends far beyond Reddit. ParseStream scans for conversations where companies can mention their product across Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, X, and Hacker News:

Every day people ask for exactly what you sell. We find those threads and draft your reply - before your competitor does.

Here is an example of their sample reply, which is as deceptive as can be.

And X went as far as designing a new type of advertisement that isn’t labeled as an advertisement at all! This isn’t labeled as an advertisement in the slightest, and clicking anywhere within it (including on the unlabeled user profile picture) takes the user to a website:

How can you escape covert advertising when a social media bakes it into the features of the site itself?

At this point, you may be filled with frustration. You have probably gone down spirals looking for the best version of something to purchase at least once. “So, screw it all with social media,” you might say! “Let’s go find another website!”

Other websites… are not much better. HouseFresh, a website that tests air filters, reported on this back in 2023, even before AI comments flooded social media. After a Google SEOSearch engine optimization. It's what sorts results on search engines like Google. update that heavily prioritized product reviews that were well-researched and tested, big media companies, such as Better Homes & Gardens, did their best to boost the appearance of testing their products. They took pictures, mentioned testing, and took custom photos, but didn’t publish any actual test data. Before this change to SEO, they did not report any kind of testing on these products. HouseFresh believes that most of these websites entirely fake testing their products for the sake of better SEO. This, too, is for the sake of affiliate farming. The more purchases that come from their sites, the more they receive back in affiliate commissions.

And, as if I’ve not shown you enough companies, Saasy Links is a company that focuses specifically on marketing SaaS companies through articles such as these, and openly brags of how it gets your company placed in listicles and other similar publications:

Every brand and listicle mention is placed on real, high-authority publications. If a mention is removed within 12 months, we replace it free.

A customer review puts it more bluntly:

“SAASY LINKS should be your go-to agency for SaaS link building. With a vast publisher network, they can get you a link from virtually any relevant site at a reasonable price. They know what they’re doing.”

How to tell covert advertisements apart from regular recommendations

The worst part of covert advertising is the difficulty in picking apart real versus fake recommendations. This is exactly what is so insidious about covert advertising, and why it works so well. The best kind of covert advertising simply perpetuates itself, because chances are that if you keep seeing recommendations for a product, you’ll end up purchasing it yourself and recommending it to friends if it’s any good!

When you wander into a Reddit thread or X comment section and see dozens of comments all recommending the same brand or product, you should regard this with extreme suspicion. Click into different users’ comment history, if viewable, and check their previous comments: did they have a tone shift in their writing? Did they take a several year long break from posting, only to come back recommending products every other thread? Do they seem to be frequently posting generic comments in high-traffic places, or is their writing filled with signs of AI generated writing? And, if their comment history is not viewable, that may be a statement of its own! Worse, sometimes multiple accounts are involved in order to make it appear more legitimate. Don’t take five replies all agreeing to be a good sign! These can just as easily be bought out. Check them all!

Be careful when searching for what to buy on search engines. Covert advertising has taken over most search results for years now. Check for affiliate links, even if the article doesn’t disclose that they are in use. But, chances are, the best way to find the right purchase to make will be to talk to a real person and to ask what they have had good and bad experiences with. If you must research and purchase online, at least make sure the seller has a good refund policy so you can get your money back when it inevitably sucks. And if a company doesn’t have a good refund policy, perhaps that is a sign of trouble too!

Because this form of advertising has become so pervasive, so difficult to detect, and is accidentally perpetuated by real people, there is no real escape from it unless you leaving social media and ignore all search results. This form of advertising purposely tries to game algorithms to show up naturally, so anything with an algorithm is weak to it.

Any algorithm is a goal, and therefore no algorithm can be trusted.