Free tool
A shadowban is invisible from the inside. Your posts look fine to you and don’t exist for anyone else. This checks what Reddit shows logged-out visitors and tells you where your account actually stands.
When your account is fine, your public profile loads for anyone. When you’re shadowbanned, Reddit returns “page not found” for your profile even though the username is still registered — that mismatch is the fingerprint. A suspension is a third thing entirely: Reddit announces it right on your profile page.
I built this checker after getting shadowbanned myself and spending most of a week posting into the void before I thought to look. The manual test (log out, open your own comment in a private window) works fine; this just saves you the incognito gymnastics. The full story of what triggered it, and what Reddit’s spam filter actually looks for, is in I got shadowbanned building a Reddit tool.
Stay out of the filter
Almost nobody gets shadowbanned for one bad post. It’s the cluster — young account, early links, lookalike replies in too many threads. These guides cover how to promote on Reddit without producing that cluster.
The founder story: what triggered the ban and what Reddit actually punishes.
The playbook for marketing a SaaS on Reddit inside the safety lines.
How to find the few threads where a mention of your product genuinely helps.
A shadowban makes your posts and comments invisible to everyone except you. You stay logged in, everything looks normal on your end, and nobody ever sees what you write. Reddit does not notify you. The only symptom is that replies, upvotes, and traffic drop to exactly zero and stay there.
It asks Reddit for your profile the way a logged-out visitor would. A visible account returns its public profile. A shadowbanned account returns "page not found" even though the username is still taken — that combination is the tell. A suspended account is different again: Reddit says so publicly. The checker reads those signals and gives you a plain verdict.
A suspension is public: your profile shows a "this account has been suspended" notice and you usually get a message from Reddit. A shadowban is silent: no notice, no message, your content just stops being visible to others. Suspensions come from admins for clear rule violations; shadowbans mostly come from automated spam filtering.
Appeal to Reddit admins at reddit.com/appeals. Explain honestly what you were doing; canned appeals get canned rejections. If the account was flagged for promotional behavior, stopping that behavior matters more than the wording of the appeal — a lifted shadowban comes back fast if the pattern resumes.
You may be filtered at the subreddit level instead. Individual communities run AutoModerator rules that silently remove posts from low-karma accounts or posts containing links, and this checker cannot see those. Open the specific post in a private window while logged out — if it is gone there, that subreddit removed it.
Usually a pattern, not a single post: a young account with little karma, product links posted before any contribution history, similar-sounding replies across multiple threads, or heavy posting in a short window. To a spam filter, that pattern is indistinguishable from a bot — however sincere each individual comment was.