Reddit Scraper — Keywords, Subreddits & Comments

Extract Reddit posts at scale using keyword search, subreddit feeds, or direct URLs. Get full post metadata, optional comments, upvote ratios, media URLs, and an AI-ready analytics report — all without a Reddit API key.

What This Actor Does

This Actor scrapes publicly available Reddit data using Reddit's JSON API endpoints — no browser automation, no Reddit API key required. It's fast, lightweight (512 MB memory), and significantly cheaper per result than browser-based alternatives.

Use cases:

• Brand monitoring — track mentions of your product, company, or competitors across Reddit
• Market research — discover what your target audience is talking about
• Lead generation — find potential customers discussing problems your product solves
• Content strategy — identify top-performing posts in your niche to guide content creation
• Academic research — collect Reddit data for NLP, sentiment analysis, or social studies
• Competitor intelligence — monitor competitor mentions and community sentiment

Key Features

✅ Multiple input modes — keyword search, subreddit feeds, direct post URLs ✅ Multi-keyword in one run — search 10 keywords at once, results combined ✅ Subreddit restriction — search within specific communities (e.g. only r/Python) ✅ Optional comments — fetch top-level comments for each post ✅ Time filters — past hour/day/week/month/year/all time ✅ Quality filters — minimum score (upvotes) and minimum comment count ✅ Full text — complete selftext body (not truncated) ✅ Media URLs — image, video, and gallery URLs extracted ✅ Analytics report — automated insights on engagement, subreddits, authors, patterns ✅ Deduplication — cross-session duplicate removal built-in ✅ Pure HTTP — no Playwright/Puppeteer, runs on 512 MB RAM

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
keywords	array	—	Search keywords (e.g. ["ChatGPT", "AI tools"])
subreddits	array	—	Restrict to subreddits (e.g. ["python", "r/MachineLearning"])
startUrls	array	—	Direct Reddit URLs (subreddit pages, posts, search URLs)
sort	select	new	Sort: relevance, new, hot, top, comments
time	select	week	Time filter: hour, day, week, month, year, all
maxPostsPerSource	integer	100	Max posts per keyword/subreddit
maxCommentsPerPost	integer	0	Top comments to fetch per post (0 = skip)
minScore	integer	0	Filter: minimum upvote score
minComments	integer	0	Filter: minimum comment count
includeNSFW	boolean	false	Include NSFW posts
includeAnalytics	boolean	true	Generate analytics report in Key-Value store
proxyConfiguration	object	Residential	Proxy settings (Apify Residential recommended)
requestDelayMs	integer	500	Delay between requests (ms)

Example Input

{
    "keywords": ["ChatGPT", "AI writing tools"],
    "subreddits": ["artificial", "ChatGPT", "MachineLearning"],
    "sort": "top",
    "time": "month",
    "maxPostsPerSource": 50,
    "maxCommentsPerPost": 10,
    "minScore": 5,
    "includeAnalytics": true
}

Output — Dataset (one item per post)

{
    "id": "1abc123",
    "name": "t3_1abc123",
    "type": "self",
    "title": "ChatGPT just saved me 4 hours of work — here's how",
    "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1abc123/chatgpt_just_saved_me/",
    "externalUrl": null,
    "author": "example_user",
    "subreddit": "ChatGPT",
    "subredditPrefixed": "r/ChatGPT",
    "subredditSubscribers": 6800000,
    "selftext": "I was stuck writing a technical specification for three hours...",
    "score": 2847,
    "upvoteRatio": 0.97,
    "upvotePct": 97,
    "numComments": 143,
    "numCrossposts": 2,
    "totalAwards": 5,
    "thumbnail": null,
    "mediaUrl": null,
    "domain": "self.ChatGPT",
    "flair": "Prompt Engineering",
    "isNSFW": false,
    "isSelf": true,
    "isVideo": false,
    "isOriginalContent": false,
    "isPinned": false,
    "isLocked": false,
    "isSpoiler": false,
    "distinguished": null,
    "crosspostParentId": null,
    "matchedKeyword": "ChatGPT",
    "postedAt": "2025-01-15T14:32:00.000Z",
    "editedAt": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2025-01-20T09:00:00.000Z",
    "comments": [
        {
            "id": "jxyz789",
            "author": "another_user",
            "body": "Which model are you using? GPT-4 or the free version?",
            "score": 312,
            "depth": 0,
            "isStickied": false,
            "distinguished": null,
            "postedAt": "2025-01-15T14:45:00.000Z",
            "editedAt": null
        }
    ]
}

Output Fields Reference

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Reddit post ID
type	string	self, link, image, video, gallery
title	string	Post title
url	string	Canonical Reddit permalink
externalUrl	string|null	External URL for link posts
author	string	Reddit username
subreddit	string	Subreddit name (without r/)
subredditSubscribers	number	Subreddit subscriber count
selftext	string|null	Full post body text (self posts only)
score	number	Net upvotes
upvoteRatio	number	Upvote ratio (0–1)
upvotePct	number	Upvote percentage (0–100)
numComments	number	Total comment count
totalAwards	number	Number of awards received
thumbnail	string|null	Thumbnail image URL
mediaUrl	string|null	Full-size image or video URL
flair	string|null	Post flair label
isNSFW	boolean	Whether post is marked NSFW
isPinned	boolean	Whether post is pinned/stickied
matchedKeyword	string|null	The keyword that found this post
postedAt	string	ISO 8601 timestamp
comments	array	Top comments (if maxCommentsPerPost > 0)

Output — Analytics Report (Key-Value store: ANALYTICS)

When includeAnalytics: true, an automated insights report is saved to the Key-Value store under the ANALYTICS key.

{
    "type": "ANALYTICS",
    "summary": {
        "totalPostsAnalyzed": 300,
        "uniqueSubreddits": 12,
        "uniqueAuthors": 287,
        "averageScore": 234,
        "medianScore": 45,
        "averageUpvoteRatio": 91.2
    },
    "topSubreddits": [
        { "subreddit": "ChatGPT", "postCount": 87, "avgScore": 512, "avgComments": 34 }
    ],
    "engagementAnalysis": {
        "scoreDistribution": { ... },
        "upvoteRatioSentiment": {
            "positive": { "label": "≥90% upvoted", "count": 210, "percentage": 70 }
        },
        "viralPosts": 8
    },
    "topAuthors": [
        { "author": "poweruser42", "postCount": 5, "totalScore": 12400, "avgScore": 2480 }
    ],
    "postingPatterns": {
        "peakHourUTC": 14,
        "peakDayOfWeek": "Tuesday"
    },
    "topPosts": [ ... ],
    "generatedAt": "2025-01-20T09:00:05.000Z"
}

How It Compares to Alternatives

Feature	This Actor	crawlerbros/reddit-keywords	fatihtahta/reddit-scraper-search-fast
Keyword search	✅	✅	✅
Subreddit feed	✅	❌	✅
Subreddit restriction	✅	❌	✅
Comments included	✅	❌	Optional
Time filter	✅	❌	✅
Min score filter	✅	❌	❌
Min comments filter	✅	❌	❌
Analytics report	✅	❌	❌
Full post text	✅	✅	✅
Media URLs	✅	Partial	✅
Browser required	❌ (Pure HTTP)	✅ (4 GB RAM!)	❌
Memory required	512 MB	4096 MB	512 MB

Tips & Best Practices

For brand monitoring: Use specific keywords ("your_brand_name") with sort: "new" and time: "day" to catch fresh mentions. Schedule the actor to run daily.

For market research: Combine relevant keywords (["pain point", "frustrated with", "looking for alternative"]) with sort: "top" and time: "month" to find the most resonant discussions.

For large runs: Set requestDelayMs: 1000 and use Apify Residential proxies to avoid rate limiting when scraping thousands of posts.

For comments analysis: Set maxCommentsPerPost: 20 to get the top 20 comments per post. Note: this multiplies API calls (1 extra call per post), so factor this into run time and cost.

Subreddit feed vs search: Leave keywords empty and only fill subreddits to scrape a subreddit's full feed (hot/new/top posts). This is ideal for monitoring specific communities.

Legal and Ethical Use

This Actor accesses only publicly available Reddit data — the same data visible to anyone visiting Reddit without an account. No authentication, login, or private data is accessed.

Use this tool in compliance with Reddit's Terms of Service and applicable data privacy laws. Do not use scraped data to identify or target individual users, send unsolicited communications, or violate Reddit's content policies.