Enter any Reddit username and we read the live public profile to estimate its Contributor Quality Score tier, from Lowest to Highest, plus the exact signals holding it back.
The real CQS is hidden. Reddit does not expose it through any API, and only moderators glimpse the tier through AutoModerator. This tool reads four publicly observable signals from a live profile, account age, combined karma, subreddit diversity, and comment-vs-post mix, and maps them to an estimate. Three more signals Reddit uses (email verification, network or location, and recent removals) are not public, so treat this as a directional self-check, not the actual score.
We fetch the public profile only. No login, nothing stored.
The Contributor Quality Score (CQS) is a hidden trust rating Reddit assigns to every account to estimate whether you act like a real community member or like a spammer. It is not shown on your profile the way karma is. Reddit places each account into one of five bands, Lowest, Low, Moderate, High, or Highest, and moderators plug that band into AutoModerator to decide whose content gets through and whose gets filtered. The score updates regularly, so it rises with genuine participation and falls quickly after a run of removed or reported posts. Reddit describes it in its own Contributor Quality Score help article and rolled it out to every community in a September 2023 r/modnews announcement.
CQS is Reddit's private, behavior-based trust rating that quietly decides how much friction your posts hit before anyone sees them.
A Low tier means thousands of subreddits auto-remove your posts before the community ever sees them, and you get no notification that it happened.
You cannot read the exact score, but you can estimate your tier from known signals and move it up with steady, genuine contribution.
Reddit sorts every account into one of these five bands. Here is what each tier signals and what it practically means for whether your content gets seen.
| Tier | Who sits here | What happens to your posts | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lowest | Brand new accounts and accounts flagged for spam or manipulation. | Auto-removed in most quality-gated subreddits before anyone sees them. | Stop posting links, verify email, and build genuine comment history for weeks. |
| Low | Promo-heavy or thin-history accounts that look risky to the classifier. | Filtered or held in many strict communities that gate on contributor quality. | Shift to comment-first participation and spread activity across subreddits. |
| Moderate | Average accounts with mixed history, neither trusted nor flagged. | Through in most subreddits, but still filtered by the strictest ones. | Keep a clean 30-day window and grow karma steadily to climb. |
| High | Established, low-risk accounts with a consistent, genuine footprint. | Clear almost all AutoModerator quality gates without extra scrutiny. | Maintain the pattern and avoid sudden bursts of promotion. |
| Highest | Long-standing, highly trusted contributors with deep history. | Effectively never blocked by contributor-quality rules. | Nothing to fix. Keep contributing and protect the account. |
Tier names are Reddit's own. Post-level outcomes depend on each subreddit's AutoModerator configuration, which moderators set individually.
Reddit names the categories of signals it uses without publishing exact weights. These are the levers the estimator above scores, what each one means, and the move that improves it.
| Signal | What it tells Reddit | Action to improve it |
|---|---|---|
| Account age and consistency | Older accounts with steady activity look more reliable than day-old accounts. | Give it time and keep participating regularly instead of in one burst. |
| Karma | Accumulated upvotes signal that other users find your contributions useful. | Earn it naturally by commenting where you add value, not by farming. |
| Account security steps | A verified email is a basic legitimacy signal that throwaways skip. | Verify your email in settings. It takes a minute and it counts. |
| Engagement quality | Thoughtful comments read as human; link dumps read as promotion. | Comment more than you post and keep replies substantive. |
| Subreddit diversity | Activity across several communities looks authentic, not single-purpose. | Participate in at least a handful of subreddits you genuinely care about. |
| Past actions on the account | Removed and reported content lowers trust; a clean record raises it. | Fix whatever gets removed and keep a clean recent window. |
| Network and location signals | Datacenter IPs, flagged VPNs, and reused devices raise spam risk. | Post from a stable home or mobile connection where you can. |
People assume high karma means their account is trusted. It does not. Here is the side-by-side that clears up the single most common misconception about Reddit account standing.
| Attribute | Karma | Contributor Quality Score |
|---|---|---|
| Visible to you | Yes, shown on your profile | No, hidden from users |
| What it measures | Lifetime upvotes on posts and comments | Current trust and behavior across the site |
| How fast it moves | Only goes up over time | Rises and falls, updated regularly |
| Who uses it | Subreddits set karma minimums in AutoMod | Subreddits gate on contributor_quality in AutoMod |
| Can it be gamed | Somewhat, via karma farming | Much harder, it weighs behavior and network signals |
| The gotcha | 50k karma does not guarantee trust | A recent bad week can drop you a tier regardless of karma |
This is why founders who buy or farm karma still get filtered. If you want to grow on Reddit without fighting invisible quality gates, tools like MediaFast focus you on genuine participation in the right communities, which is the same behavior that lifts your CQS in the first place.
Your tier only matters because moderators can act on it. AutoModerator exposes a contributor_quality check that thousands of subreddits use to hold or remove posts from lower-tier accounts. Here is roughly what that rule looks like.
# Filter posts from low-trust accounts for mod review --- type: submission contributor_quality: [lowest, low] action: filter action_reason: "Low contributor quality tier" --- # Remove comments from the very lowest tier if karma is also thin type: comment combined_karma: "< 20" contributor_quality: lowest action: remove action_reason: "Lowest CQS and low karma"
filter sends your post to the mod queue instead of the feed, where it waits for a human. If mods are slow or absent, it may never get approved.
remove takes the post down outright. You still see it on your profile, which is exactly why a low CQS feels like a shadowban even though your account is fine.
There is also a contributor_quality_net variant that some communities use for a stricter, network-adjusted read. Either way, the fix is the same: raise your standing.
CQS updates regularly, so a consistent month of good behavior moves the needle. Work these in order, from fastest win to slowest build.
This is the one instant win. A verified email is a basic account-security signal Reddit names directly, and unverified throwaways sit at the bottom by default.
Recent removals weigh heavily. If a certain link or subreddit keeps rejecting you, pause it. One clean 30-day window does more than months of old history.
Aim for far more genuine comments than posts. Engagement quality is a core input, and a commenter footprint reads as a real member, not a promoter.
Single-subreddit accounts look single-purpose. Participate in several communities you actually care about so your activity looks authentic and varied.
Comment where you can genuinely help. Do not farm. Steady karma from real threads is a trust signal; sudden karma spikes are a manipulation flag.
Where privacy allows, post from your normal home or mobile network rather than a datacenter IP, flagged VPN, or a brand new device tied to nothing.
Consistency beats volume. A little activity most days looks human. Going from silent to 15 posts in a day is a classic bot pattern that tanks trust.
Removals from rule breaks hurt your standing even when they feel unfair. Skim the sidebar and pinned rules so you stop collecting avoidable removals.
CQS is not instant. Work the steps above for three to four weeks, then run the estimator again to see whether your tier has likely moved up.
The behaviors that quietly lift your tier, next to the ones that drag it down without any warning.
Verify your email and secure the account
Comment far more than you post
Participate across several genuine subreddits
Keep a clean recent record with no removals
Grow karma slowly through real contributions
Blast the same link across many subreddits
Post only promotional content and never engage
Buy or farm karma to fake credibility
Post exclusively through datacenter IPs or flagged VPNs
Go from silent to a burst of posts overnight
Most people never realize they are doing these, because Reddit never tells them their tier dropped.
Treating karma as a trust score. High karma feels like credibility, but CQS weighs current behavior. A viral post from last year does nothing for a bad recent month.
Posting before the account has any history. A day-old account that immediately drops links looks exactly like a spam bot to the classifier. Warm the account up first.
Only ever posting, never commenting. A post-only footprint reads as promotion. Engagement quality is a core signal, and comments are how you build it.
Living in a single subreddit. Concentrated activity in one community looks single-purpose. Diversity across subreddits reads as a genuine user.
Ignoring removals. Every removed or reported post chips away at standing. If something keeps getting pulled, stop doing it instead of retrying.
Always posting through a VPN or proxy. Network signals count. Exclusive use of datacenter IPs or flagged VPNs adds risk that a home connection would not.
Expecting an overnight fix. CQS moves with sustained behavior, not a single good day. People give up after 48 hours and miss the recovery that a steady month brings.
Reddit is deliberately vague about the exact math, but a few things are on the record from its own help center and moderator announcements.
5 tiers
from Lowest to Highest is how Reddit classifies every account, per its own Contributor Quality Score documentation.
Read Reddit's articleSept 2023
is when Reddit made CQS available to all communities, announced to moderators on r/modnews after quiet testing earlier that year.
See the announcementHidden
is the whole design. Users cannot see their CQS, and moderators act on it only through the AutoModerator contributor_quality check.
See the AutoMod docsA practical walkthrough of building genuine Reddit karma and account standing, the same participation signals that lift your Contributor Quality Score tier over time.
The vocabulary that comes up whenever moderators and marketers talk about Reddit account quality.
Contributor Quality Score. Reddit's hidden, behavior-based trust rating for every account, sorted into five tiers from Lowest to Highest. It decides how much friction your posts hit before they reach a community.
The AutoModerator check that reads your CQS tier. Moderators use it in subreddit rules to filter or remove posts from accounts below a chosen tier. It is the mechanism that turns an invisible score into a real gate.
A stricter, network-adjusted variant of the contributor_quality check. Some communities prefer it to weigh network signals more heavily when filtering.
The public point total from upvotes on your posts and comments. Related to CQS but separate: karma is a visible lifetime tally, CQS is a hidden live trust rating that can drop even while karma stays high.
The bot built into every subreddit that moderators configure with rules. It is where contributor_quality, karma minimums, and account-age gates are enforced automatically, per post, before a human sees anything.
A separate, site-wide silent restriction applied by Reddit admins, not the same as a low CQS. Both make your posts invisible to others, which is why they are so often confused. A low CQS is a subreddit-level quality gate; a shadowban hides you everywhere.
If your CQS is holding your posts back, the underlying fix is the same as the growth strategy: show up as a real contributor in the communities that matter to you. That is exactly what MediaFast is built to help founders do, so you spend your time on genuine engagement instead of guessing why your posts keep vanishing.
Everything about the Contributor Quality Score and how to read your tier.
CQS stands for Contributor Quality Score. It is a hidden signal Reddit assigns to every account to estimate whether you behave like a genuine community member or like a spammer. Unlike karma, it is not shown on your profile. Reddit sorts accounts into five tiers: Lowest, Low, Moderate, High, and Highest. Moderators use it inside AutoModerator to decide whose posts get through and whose get filtered.
No, and any tool that claims to is guessing. Reddit does not expose the Contributor Quality Score through a public API, and even moderators only see the tier band, not a number. This checker is an estimator: you enter a username, it reads the four signals it can observe on the live public profile, account age, combined karma, subreddit diversity, and comment-vs-post mix, and maps them to a directional tier. The other signals Reddit uses, such as email verification, recent removals, and network or location, are not public, so they cannot be read from a profile and are left out of the estimate.
There is no official button that displays your CQS. The practical options are: use an estimator like the one above to gauge your tier from your account signals, or ask in a moderator community that runs a CQS lookup bot. Because Reddit keeps the real value private, an honest estimate based on your account behavior is the most reliable read most users can get.
Karma is public and counts upvotes on your posts and comments over the life of the account. CQS is private and measures trust and behavior right now. An account can have tens of thousands of karma from one viral post and still sit in a Low CQS tier after a recent run of removed or reported content. Karma is a lifetime scoreboard; CQS is a live trust rating that moves up and down.
Verify your email, comment more than you post, participate genuinely across several subreddits instead of one, avoid getting content removed or reported, build karma naturally over time, and post from a stable connection rather than a datacenter IP or fresh throwaway device. CQS updates regularly, so consistent good behavior raises it and a spammy stretch drops it fast.
A very common cause is a low Contributor Quality Score combined with a subreddit AutoModerator rule. Thousands of communities configure AutoMod to filter or remove posts from accounts whose contributor_quality falls below a set tier, often combined with a karma minimum. You are not banned, your account is simply below that subreddit's trust threshold, so your post never reaches the feed.
Reddit tested CQS quietly through early 2023 and then rolled it out to all communities in September 2023, announced on the r/modnews moderator community. It was introduced to give moderators a better spam signal than blunt account age and karma minimums, which were filtering out real users while missing some spammers.
It can. Reddit lists network and location signals among the inputs to Contributor Quality Score. Posting through datacenter IP ranges, known VPN providers, or an IP previously tied to banned accounts adds risk signals. An occasional VPN session is unlikely to sink an otherwise healthy account, but posting exclusively through flagged infrastructure is a pattern that drags the score down.
Yes. A higher tier means your posts clear more AutoModerator quality gates, so more of your content actually reaches communities instead of being silently filtered. The catch is that CQS rewards genuine participation, not promotion, so the way you raise it is by being a real contributor first. That is also what keeps you out of shadowban and spam-filter trouble later.
MediaFast helps founders grow on Reddit through genuine participation, the same behavior that lifts your account standing.
