Reddit CQS: What It Is and How to Improve Your Contributor Quality Score

Your Reddit posts are being evaluated by a scoring system most users have never heard of. It is called the Contributor Quality Score, or CQS, and it runs silently in the background of every account on the platform. Unlike karma, which you can see and track, CQS is a hidden metric — a quality signal Reddit uses to assess whether your contributions are spam or genuine value.

If your posts are being filtered, your comments seem invisible, or you keep hitting unexplained restrictions despite having solid karma, your CQS may be the culprit. Understanding what it is and how to improve it can be the difference between an account that thrives on Reddit and one that never gets traction.

What Is Reddit CQS?

The Contributor Quality Score is Reddit's internal content quality signal — a reputation metric assigned to every Reddit account that reflects the overall quality and trustworthiness of that account's contributions. Reddit uses CQS as part of its broader spam detection and content quality systems to determine how much weight to give to posts and comments from any given account.

According to Reddit's help documentation, the CQS is designed to "help Reddit understand whether a contributor's posts and comments are quality content or potential spam." It was introduced as Reddit recognized that karma alone was an insufficient proxy for account quality — karma can be gamed, inherited from repost spam, or concentrated in free karma communities that say nothing about genuine contribution quality.

Think of CQS like a credit score for your Reddit account. Your credit score is not just your income — it reflects the full history of how you have managed financial obligations. Similarly, your CQS is not just your karma total — it reflects the full pattern of how your contributions have been received, engaged with, and evaluated by Reddit's systems.

How CQS Differs From Karma

Karma and CQS measure different things:

• Karma is a public-facing cumulative count of net upvotes received on posts and comments. It tells other users how much you have contributed over time, but it does not capture the quality or distribution of those contributions.
• CQS is a private signal that captures the *quality pattern* of your contributions — whether your posts receive genuine engagement, whether they are reported, whether they are removed, and whether the communities you post in find them valuable.

A key distinction: an account can have extremely high karma and still have a poor CQS. If that karma came from reposting viral content, participating in free karma subreddits, or flooding engagement bait across general communities, the CQS may not reflect that karma at all. Reddit's systems are sophisticated enough to distinguish between karma that signals genuine contribution and karma that signals gaming.

According to Social Media Examiner's 2025 analysis of Reddit platform mechanics, CQS is increasingly important in determining which posts receive organic distribution from Reddit's recommendation systems, particularly in the Discover and Trending feeds that drive significant traffic to top posts.

CQS Tiers: What Each Level Means

Reddit's CQS operates on a five-tier scale. Each tier affects how your content is treated by the platform's moderation and distribution systems.

Most new accounts start at Medium and move up or down based on how their contributions are received. Accounts that engage in behaviors flagged by Reddit's spam detection — excessive self-promotion, vote manipulation, ban evasion — drop toward Low or Lowest. Accounts that consistently produce content the community upvotes, engages with, and reports at low rates move toward High and Highest.

Importantly, CQS is not permanent. It is a dynamic score that updates as your contribution pattern changes. An account at Lowest can work its way back to Medium and beyond through sustained, genuine participation.

How to Check Your Reddit CQS

Reddit does not display your CQS score in your account dashboard. It is a backend metric, not a public-facing number. However, there are two reliable ways to check it.

Method 1: r/WhatIsMyCQS

The subreddit r/WhatIsMyCQS exists specifically for this purpose. Post in the subreddit and an automated bot will reply with your current CQS tier. The bot queries Reddit's API to retrieve your account's quality score and returns the result within minutes. This is the most accurate method because it retrieves the actual value Reddit has assigned to your account.

Method 2: r/ShadowBan

The r/ShadowBan subreddit's automated bot also reports CQS information alongside shadowban status when you post there. This is useful for users who want to check both metrics simultaneously — CQS and shadowban status are closely related, and an account at Lowest CQS is at significantly elevated risk of a Reddit shadowban.

Method 3: Reddit's Official Transparency Features

Reddit has stated that it is working toward giving users more direct visibility into their account health metrics. As of early 2026, some users with access to Reddit's account health features can see a CQS indicator within their account settings. Check Settings > Account Health if this feature has been rolled out to your account.

You can also use our free Reddit user analyzer to analyze any Reddit account's contribution patterns, karma distribution, and posting history — the same signals that feed into CQS calculation. If you are concerned about shadowban status, the free Reddit shadowban checker will confirm whether your account is currently visible to other users.

Why CQS Matters for Reddit Marketing

For brands, marketers, and anyone using Reddit to build visibility, CQS is not an abstract platform metric. It has direct, practical consequences on what you can accomplish.

Content Distribution

Reddit's recommendation algorithms — particularly the systems that surface content to users who do not already follow a subreddit — weight account CQS when deciding which posts to distribute. According to Buffer's research on social platform algorithms, content quality signals are among the top three factors in organic content distribution decisions across major social networks. On Reddit, CQS is one of those signals.

An account at Highest CQS can see posts distributed to Reddit's Discover tab, relevant trending feeds, and the broader Reddit ecosystem beyond the subreddit where the post was made. An account at Lowest CQS may see its posts visible in the subreddit but receive almost no algorithmic amplification beyond that initial audience.

AutoModerator Interactions

Many subreddits configure AutoModerator to hold or remove posts from accounts below certain quality thresholds. While AutoModerator operates primarily on karma and account age (visible metrics), some subreddits also configure filters based on Reddit's internal account quality signals. An account with Low or Lowest CQS will trigger stricter AutoModerator filtering in these communities.

Shadowban Risk

There is a strong relationship between CQS tier and shadowban risk. Accounts at Lowest CQS have been flagged repeatedly by Reddit's automated systems as potential sources of spam or low-quality content. This does not guarantee a shadowban, but it means the account is operating under maximum automated scrutiny. A single additional trigger — a spam report, a posting pattern that crosses a threshold — can convert a Lowest CQS account into a shadowbanned one.

Conversely, accounts at High and Highest CQS have demonstrated patterns that Reddit's systems recognize as genuinely valuable. These accounts are much less likely to be impacted by automated enforcement actions.

Karma Farming and CQS

Accounts that build karma through tactics that inflate the number without reflecting genuine quality contribution — reposting viral content, farming in free karma communities, mass-commenting with low-effort replies — will often find their CQS does not reflect their karma total. CQS sees through karma inflation because it measures *how* contributions are received, not just *how many upvotes* they receive. For a full breakdown of how to build karma sustainably alongside a strong CQS, see our guide on Reddit karma farming.

How CQS Changed Reddit (A Brief History)

Reddit's quality scoring systems have existed in various forms since the platform's early days, but the formalization of CQS as a named, documented metric represents a significant shift in how Reddit communicates about account quality to users.

Before CQS was publicly documented, Reddit enforced quality standards primarily through shadowbanning, subreddit bans, and account suspensions. These were binary, often opaque enforcement actions that gave users little signal about what behavior was being flagged or how close they were to an enforcement action.

The introduction of a tiered quality score gives Reddit a more graduated enforcement tool. Instead of flipping immediately from unrestricted to banned, Reddit can progressively restrict accounts at lower CQS tiers — holding posts for review, reducing distribution weight, applying stricter filtering — before escalating to harder enforcement.

According to Reddit's 2025 transparency report, the platform actioned over 258 million pieces of spam content and took enforcement action on tens of millions of accounts. The CQS system is part of a broader effort to make these enforcement decisions more graduated and to give users clearer signals about account health before hard actions are taken.

For marketers, this evolution matters: it means that the health of a Reddit account is now more visible and more recoverable than it was under a purely binary ban-or-not system. But it also means that the signals Reddit is watching are more sophisticated than ever.

How to Improve Your Reddit CQS

Improving your CQS requires changing the behavioral patterns that are depressing it. There is no shortcut that bypasses the underlying quality signals — Reddit's systems are specifically designed to detect and ignore gaming attempts. The strategies that reliably improve CQS are the same strategies that make you a better Reddit contributor.

1. Post Original, High-Value Content

The single most powerful driver of CQS improvement is consistently posting content that receives genuine positive engagement — upvotes, comments, saves, and shares — without triggering reports or removals.

This means:

• Writing original posts rather than reposting content already on Reddit
• Providing substantial value in every post — information, entertainment, or perspective that the community genuinely finds useful
• Choosing subreddits where your content is a natural fit for the community's interests
• Investing in post quality over post quantity

A post that earns 200 genuine upvotes and 30 comments in a relevant community contributes far more to your CQS than 20 posts that each receive 3 upvotes in a general-purpose subreddit.

2. Diversify Across Subreddits

Concentrating all activity in a single subreddit, or posting the same content repeatedly across many subreddits, are both patterns Reddit's systems flag as suspicious. High-CQS accounts tend to have participation spread across multiple communities, reflecting the behavior of a genuine user with diverse interests rather than a single-purpose marketing account.

Aim for genuine participation in at least 5-10 distinct subreddits, with a mix of posting and commenting activity in each.

3. Engage in Comments, Not Just Posts

Comment karma and the quality of comment engagement are significant inputs to CQS. Accounts that post but never comment, or that comment in patterns that look automated — brief, generic replies across dozens of threads — register as lower quality than accounts where the comment history shows genuine conversation.

Invest in writing substantial, useful replies to threads where you have real knowledge. Respond to replies on your own posts. Engage with questions directed at you. This comment engagement pattern is one of the clearest signals of a genuine, high-quality contributor.

4. Follow the 90/10 Self-Promotion Rule

Reddit's self-promotion guidelines state that no more than 10% of your contributions should be self-promotional. Exceeding this threshold is a direct negative input to CQS, because it patterns your account like spam.

For every self-promotional post, make at least nine contributions that are not about your brand, product, or website. These can be genuine comments, educational posts, or content sharing relevant to the community — anything that demonstrates you are a participant rather than a broadcaster.

5. Avoid Actions That Trigger Spam Detection

Certain behaviors reliably damage CQS because they pattern-match spam:

• Posting the same link or near-identical content to multiple subreddits within a short period
• Using automated tools to post, comment, or vote at scale
• Mass messaging other users with promotional content
• Sudden spikes in activity on an account that has been relatively quiet
• Operating multiple accounts linked to the same IP address or device

Each of these triggers negative inputs to CQS. Avoiding them prevents the score from declining further and allows gradual improvement from genuine activity.

6. Earn Upvotes on Your Best Content

For marketers and brands with content that genuinely deserves wider visibility, buying Reddit upvotes is a legitimate way to accelerate the positive engagement signals that CQS algorithms measure. When your content earns strong early engagement — high upvote velocity, comment activity, saves — it signals to Reddit's systems that the content is valued by the community.

This works because Reddit's quality systems, including CQS, are ultimately measuring whether contributions are received positively by the community. When you get real Reddit upvotes on content that genuinely provides value, you are helping that content demonstrate its quality to the algorithm, which benefits both immediate distribution and the underlying CQS of the account that published it.

The critical distinction: boosting genuine, high-quality content builds CQS over time. Boosting low-quality promotional content that would otherwise be downvoted or reported does not — and attempting to do so risks detection and enforcement.

7. Recover From a Low Score Gradually

If your account is at Low or Lowest CQS, recovery requires patience. There is no immediate fix. The algorithm needs to observe a sustained change in contribution patterns before updating the score upward.

A practical recovery timeline:

• Weeks 1-4: Stop any behavior that may have triggered the low score. Focus exclusively on genuine comment participation in communities where you have real interest.
• Weeks 4-8: Begin posting original content at a conservative pace — no more than two to three posts per week. Monitor engagement and avoid anything that could trigger reports or removals.
• Weeks 8-12: If engagement is positive, gradually expand posting volume. Your CQS should begin improving as the new pattern of quality contributions accumulates.

Recovery from Lowest to Medium typically takes 60-90 days of consistent genuine participation. Recovery from Low to High can take longer, particularly if the original low score was the result of significant policy violations rather than unintentional spam patterns.

If you are concerned that your account has been shadowbanned in addition to having a low CQS, use the free Reddit shadowban checker to confirm — both conditions require different recovery approaches, and a shadowban needs to be addressed through Reddit's appeals process before any CQS recovery strategy will be effective.

CQS, Shadowbans, and Account Suspensions: How They Relate

CQS, shadowbans, and account suspensions are three distinct account health mechanisms, but they are deeply interconnected.

CQS is a continuous quality signal. It is always being updated based on your contribution patterns. A low CQS does not mean you are banned — it means Reddit's systems are treating your account with more scrutiny.

Shadowbans are binary enforcement actions. They are typically applied to accounts that have already exhibited sustained patterns of spam or manipulation — patterns that would have been associated with low CQS over time. An account at Lowest CQS is at elevated risk of a shadowban, because the signals that produce a low CQS are the same signals that shadowban algorithms respond to.

Account suspensions are formal enforcement actions, either temporary or permanent, applied to accounts that have violated Reddit's content policy. They are the most severe outcome and require a formal appeals process. Unlike shadowbans, suspensions notify the user. Understanding the full spectrum of Reddit account suspensions is important if your account is at risk — the path to recovery differs significantly depending on which enforcement action has been applied.

The relationship is roughly linear: as CQS declines, shadowban risk increases, and if significant violations occur, suspension becomes the outcome. Maintaining a healthy CQS is the upstream intervention that prevents the downstream enforcement actions.

The Contributor Quality Score is one of the least-discussed but most consequential account metrics on Reddit. For anyone using Reddit for marketing, brand building, or professional presence, understanding CQS and actively managing it is as important as building karma.

The path to a high CQS is straightforward: post original content that the community values, diversify your participation across subreddits, engage genuinely in comments, follow the 90/10 self-promotion guideline, and avoid the automated behaviors that trigger spam detection. Combined with a Reddit upvote service to give your best content the initial visibility it deserves, this approach builds the kind of account Reddit's systems reward — one that earns distribution, avoids enforcement, and delivers results over the long term.