Which sites belong on a parasite SEO sites list, and which ones get you penalized?

Parasite SEO is the practice of ranking on Google through a site that already has authority instead of through your own domain. The term covers two very different activities. One is renting a page: paying a publisher, or a broker, to host your article on a strong domain so it borrows that domain's ranking signals. The other is participating on a platform: posting under your own account on a site built for user content, such as a subreddit, a YouTube channel or a GitHub repository.

Most pages ranking for “parasite SEO sites” blur the two, and many are price lists for the first kind. That is the version Google wrote a spam policy about, and the one that got national publishers removed from search results in November 2024.⁴ A useful list answers four questions per site: what the platform is for, what its own rules say about self-promotion, whether outbound links pass ranking credit, and whether AI engines cite it. Bavior's parasite SEO feature page shows the Reddit version inside the product.

Ten platforms qualify, because on each one publishing under your own account is the intended use rather than a paid exception. Every row was checked on 20 Sep 2026. A cell reads not published where the platform does not document the answer and we could not verify it ourselves.

Three patterns stand out. First, every platform restricts promotion, and Medium and Substack name search rankings as a banned motive.¹² Second, the link column barely matters. Google recommends marking user-generated links with rel="ugc" and says links qualified this way “will generally not be followed”.¹⁰ The value of these hosts is the page that ranks and the mention inside it, not link equity. Third, only five of the ten appear in either of Ahrefs' top 50 tables, and only Reddit sits near the top of both.⁵

Bavior is an AI agent for Reddit growth and AI search visibility, built around the problem this list describes: the pages that rank and get cited for your category already exist, and you are not in them. It runs in three steps, and you hold the one that matters.

First, it finds the threads. Bavior tracks which domains AI engines cite for your category's prompts, and which Reddit threads hold those citations. In the Top Cited Domains card below, reddit.com leads the sample workspace with a UGC type label.

Second, it drafts a native reply in your voice. The subreddit's rules are read before the draft is written. The draft answers the OP first and names your product only where it is an honest fit. Where a subreddit requires disclosure of commercial affiliation, the post has to carry it, as the sample draft below does in its last paragraph: “Context: I work on Quietdesk”.

Third, nothing publishes until you approve it. Every draft waits in a queue marked Pending approval, where you edit, approve or skip. Approved replies go out from your own Reddit account or from Bavior's aged, high-karma accounts, and both modes pass through the same approval step. There is no vote manipulation, no staged sockpuppet conversation, and no promise that a mod will keep a comment up. Account safety is risk reduction, not immunity.

Lena, the founder of a two-person help desk startup, ran this for six weeks. Seven of the ten page-one results for her main buyer question were Reddit threads. She approved nine replies and skipped fourteen drafts that felt forced, and her product is now named in three of those threads. Illustrative rather than a customer report: the outcome is mention share, not a ranking anyone can promise.

Run four checks before you publish anything on a host you do not own.

• Would it exist without Google? If the content only makes sense as a ranking play, Google and the platform both treat it as spam.
• Is it under your own name or account? LinkedIn bans fake profiles, Reddit's Rule 5 says be authentic, and Product Hunt wants profiles that represent an individual.¹¹¹²
• Did you read the local rule? On Reddit that means the subreddit's sidebar and wiki, not only the sitewide policy. See the guide to promoting on Reddit without getting banned and the Reddit glossary for karma, flair and shadowban.
• Did you disclose? Stack Overflow requires it in every post that mentions your product, and many subreddits require it for any commercial tie.¹²

Then measure the right thing: not a backlink count, but whether your brand is named in the pages that rank and get cited for your category, tracked as mention share over time. The AI SEO feature reports on exactly that.