BEAT $2.8 21.89% FLOKI $0.000021 4.14% APE $0.156 9.07% AXS $0.8625 2.68% MANA $0.0666 2.10% SAND $0.0444 1.79% GEOD $0.2525 16.53% GOMINING $0.2833 2.60% WEMIX $0.2108 3.32% RLB $0.0644 1.65% IMX $0.122 3.69% GALA $0.001915 3.12% BEAT $2.8 21.89% FLOKI $0.000021 4.14% APE $0.156 9.07% AXS $0.8625 2.68% MANA $0.0666 2.10% SAND $0.0444 1.79% GEOD $0.2525 16.53% GOMINING $0.2833 2.60% WEMIX $0.2108 3.32% RLB $0.0644 1.65% IMX $0.122 3.69% GALA $0.001915 3.12%
Tokens
Methodology

What is Shill Detection?

Shill detection flags promotion that hides a financial incentive, or fakes grassroots support through coordinated activity. We check for it in three places: store reviews, social accounts, and YouTube video descriptions.

  • Store reviews
  • Social signals
  • Paid promotion
  • Editorial impact

Overview

A shill is an undisclosed promoter, paid or coordinated to make a game or token look more popular than it is.

We run three independent checks against every game we cover: an automated pass over store reviews, a behavior score on official social accounts, and a scan of YouTube video descriptions for financial ties. Each produces its own output, and none depends on the other two.

Store review authenticity

For games listed on a store like Steam, we run every available user review through an automated pass that flags inauthentic positive reviews. The output is a shill rate (the share of reviews flagged) and a one-line summary of the pattern we found.

The check looks for five patterns common to coordinated or paid reviews:

  • Generic praise: enthusiasm that could describe any game, with no specific detail.
  • Copy-paste phrasing: near-identical wording repeated across multiple reviews.
  • Short five-star reviews: the highest rating with no supporting detail.
  • Hype without substance: promotional language that never mentions gameplay mechanics.
  • Mass-rating patterns: reviews posted in a tight, suspicious burst.

Social-media behavior

We score a game's official X (Twitter) and Telegram accounts on three dimensions: Activity (how often the account posts), Quality (whether posts carry real information), and Authenticity (whether the account reads as organic or manufactured). Each dimension scores from 0 to 100.

Two tags point to shilling:

  • bot_spam: a feed of automated posts, generic hype, or coordinated engagement farming.
  • promotional_only: nothing beyond retweets, giveaways, and promotion, with no development updates or real community interaction.

Affiliate & sponsored content

We scan the YouTube video descriptions we pull for a game, checking for signs the creator had a financial relationship with the product covered. Four signal categories flag a likely paid or sponsored placement:

  • Affiliate shorteners: link services such as amzn.to, geni.us, and bit.ly, used to mask commission links.
  • Affiliate networks: domains belonging to Commission Junction, ShareASale, Awin, Impact, Rakuten, and similar commission platforms.
  • Platform parameters: store-specific tracking parameters for Amazon, Steam, Epic Games, Humble Bundle, GOG, and G2A.
  • Referral parameters: generic tracking parameters, such as ref, aff, affiliate, and referral, that can appear on any domain.

How this shapes our coverage

We use each of the three checks differently:

  • Store review shill rates go to our writers as context, so quotes pulled from player reviews come from the authentic share of the pool.
  • Affiliate flags discount a video's weight in our community-sentiment calculation.
  • Social shill tags (bot_spam, promotional_only) factor into a game's legitimacy score alongside website quality and on-chain data.

Caveats

We treat these signals as evidence, not verdicts. Each one adds a data point to a broader legitimacy read, and none of them decides a game's standing alone.

  • Coverage is conditional: review analysis runs only for games listed on a store like Steam, social scoring only for accounts we can find, and affiliate scanning only for videos we already pull for a game. We don't extend a clean result on one channel to a channel we never checked.
  • The review check is conservative: it flags a review only when several signals line up together. A low shill rate means we found no strong pattern in the reviews we checked.
  • promotional_only is a narrow tag: it applies only to accounts with no content beyond promotion, such as retweets, giveaways, and buy prompts. Marketing next to real development updates doesn't trigger it.
  • An affiliate flag discloses an incentive: the creator had a financial interest in the product. We don't treat the flag as a verdict on the video's accuracy.
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