Reddit is the community-marketing channel that most small businesses don't even try, and then when they do, they post three promotional comments in a big subreddit and get instantly banned. The platform rewards earned participation and punishes drive-by marketing with surgical precision.
The Reddit Community Audit works two ways. Point it at a subreddit to vet whether it's worth your time. Subscriber count, active-user count, description depth, rules page completeness. Point it at your own Reddit user profile to see whether your karma and comment history carry enough weight that posts from you won't get auto-removed by moderator-bot filters (karma under ~100 gets caught in almost every larger subreddit).
The audit is deliberately light. Reddit's public data is thin without the API. The generated AI brief does the heavier lift: given a subreddit and your business, Claude writes three earned-participation comments you could leave, and a 30-day plan to build enough karma that your eventual promotion post lands.
Methodology: Chapter 18 of The $20 Dollar Agency, Social Media Playbook. Reddit is the patient-marketing chapter. Chapter 50 of The $100 Network, Social Distribution and Content Repurposing, covers how Reddit fits into a multi-channel strategy.