Reddit Search Scraper — Search Reddit by Keyword & Scrape the Results (No API Key)

The Reddit keyword search scraper: turn any search term into structured posts, comments, and subreddits. No login, no API key, no rate limits — from $1.50 per 1,000 results.

What it does • How to use • Input • Output • Use cases • Pricing • FAQ

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What does Reddit Search Scraper do? {#what-does-reddit-search-scraper-do}

Reddit Search Scraper is built around one job: you give it keywords, it runs each one as a Reddit search and saves everything that matches as clean, structured data. Each term can return posts (the default), comments, and communities (subreddits) — pick any combination per run.

You stay in control of how Reddit ranks the matches: sort by relevance, hot, top, new, or comment count, and narrow the window from the last hour all the way out to all time. Want laser focus instead of site-wide coverage? Point withinCommunity at a single subreddit (gaming and r/gaming both work) and the search never leaves it. You can even flip on crawlCommentsPerPost to pull the discussion under every post the search finds.

There is no Reddit account, no OAuth app, and no API key involved — the scraper reads public Reddit directly and sidesteps the official API's 600-requests-per-10-minutes ceiling. Results land in your Apify dataset ready to export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML, or to flow into n8n, Zapier, Make, the REST API, or MCP-connected AI agents.

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How to search Reddit by keyword (step by step) {#how-to-search-reddit-by-keyword}

Going from a keyword to a downloadable dataset takes about a minute:

1. Sign up for Apify for free, or log in to your existing account
2. Open Reddit Search Scraper
3. Add one or more Search keywords — each one runs as its own independent Reddit search
4. Tick what you want back: posts (on by default), comments, and/or communities
5. Pick a sort order (relevance / hot / top / new / comments) and a time range (last hour → all time)
6. Optionally fill Limit search to a community to stay inside one subreddit
7. Hit Start, then grab your results as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the dataset tab

💡 Every saved item carries the searchTerm that produced it, so multi-keyword runs are trivial to split apart afterwards.

Fine-tuning knobs: maxPostsCount, maxCommentsCount, and maxCommunitiesCount cap how much each search term saves; crawlCommentsPerPost + maxCommentsPerPost add the comment thread under each matched post; includeNSFW opts into 18+ content (off by default).

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Input example: Reddit keyword monitoring {#input-example}

A classic reddit brand monitoring setup — watch a brand name across all of Reddit, freshest mentions first, restricted to the past week:

{
  "searchTerms": ["Notion", "Notion AI"],
  "searchPosts": true,
  "searchComments": true,
  "searchCommunities": false,
  "searchSort": "new",
  "searchTime": "week",
  "maxPostsCount": 100,
  "maxCommentsCount": 200,
  "includeNSFW": false,
  "proxy": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

To keep the same watchlist inside one community, add "withinCommunity": "r/productivity" — the search then runs only against that subreddit. To also capture the conversation under each matching post, set "crawlCommentsPerPost": true with a "maxCommentsPerPost" cap.

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Output example {#output-example}

Every match is saved as a flat JSON object with a dataType discriminator (post, comment, or community). Here's a post item found by a keyword search:

{
  "dataType": "post",
  "id": "t3_1kx94qe",
  "parsedId": "1kx94qe",
  "title": "Switched our whole team to Notion AI — honest review after 3 months",
  "body": "We migrated from a mix of Confluence and Google Docs back in March...",
  "postType": "text",
  "flair": "Review",
  "authorName": "ops_lead_42",
  "authorId": "t2_9k3mfa",
  "parsedAuthorId": "9k3mfa",
  "communityName": "r/productivity",
  "parsedCommunityName": "productivity",
  "subredditName": "productivity",
  "subredditId": "t5_2qkq6",
  "subredditSubscribers": 2890000,
  "postUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1kx94qe/",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1kx94qe/",
  "score": 847,
  "upVotes": 847,
  "upvoteRatio": 0.94,
  "commentsCount": 213,
  "totalAwardsReceived": 1,
  "nsfw": false,
  "over18": false,
  "isSelf": true,
  "locked": false,
  "stickied": false,
  "edited": false,
  "domain": "self.productivity",
  "mediaType": "text",
  "hasMedia": false,
  "isVideo": false,
  "isGallery": false,
  "ageHours": 52.4,
  "scorePerHour": 16.16,
  "commentsPerHour": 4.06,
  "engagementTotal": 1060,
  "commentToScoreRatio": 0.25,
  "isHighEngagement": true,
  "titleLength": 62,
  "bodyLength": 1845,
  "wordCount": 322,
  "createdAt": "2026-06-07T09:14:00.000Z",
  "crawledAt": "2026-06-09T13:38:00.000Z",
  "searchTerm": "Notion AI"
}

Posts arrive with 70+ fields in total — including media details (galleryImages, mediaAssets, videoUrl), moderation flags, and derived engagement analytics. Comment items add thread context (postTitle, parentId, depth, controversiality, isSubmitter), and community items report membersCount, onlineUsersCount, descriptions, and icons.

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What can you do with scraped Reddit search results? {#use-cases}

• 🔔 Reddit brand monitoring — track keywords on Reddit like your brand, product names, and common misspellings; sort by new, schedule the run, and catch every mention while it's still answerable.
• 🎯 Lead generation — search phrases your buyers actually type ("looking for a CRM", "alternative to X") and surface threads where a helpful reply can win a customer.
• 📊 Market research — pull unfiltered opinions on a product category from across Reddit or inside one niche subreddit, then mine the body text for pain points and feature requests.
• 📈 Trend tracking — re-run the same keywords on a schedule with searchTime: "day" and watch score, commentsCount, and scorePerHour to spot topics gaining momentum before they peak.
• ✍️ Content discovery — find the top-voted questions and discussions around your topic (searchSort: "top") to fuel blog posts, videos, and FAQ pages people already want.

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How much does Reddit Search Scraper cost? {#pricing}

Billing is pay per result — there is no subscription and no platform markup. You're charged a small fee to start the run plus a per-item fee for every result stored:

• Run start: $0.02
• Per stored result: $0.0015

That works out to $1.52 for 1,000 results, $15.02 for 10,000, and so on — roughly from $1.50 per 1,000 results, with zero cost between runs. A daily keyword-monitoring schedule that saves 50 mentions per day costs about $0.10/day.

Keep runs cheap by tuning maxPostsCount / maxCommentsCount per search term: you only pay for what gets stored.

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FAQ {#faq}

Do I need a Reddit API key or account?

No. Reddit Search Scraper reads publicly visible search results directly, so there's nothing to register: no API key, no OAuth app, no Reddit login. It also isn't bound by the official API's 600 requests per 10 minutes limit.

Can I monitor a keyword on Reddit over time?

Yes — this is the actor's sweet spot. Configure your keywords with searchSort: "new" and a short window like searchTime: "day", then create a Schedule in the Apify Console to re-run it hourly or daily. Pair it with a webhook or an n8n/Zapier/Make flow and new mentions land in Slack, a spreadsheet, or your CRM automatically.

Can I search within a single subreddit?

Yes. Set withinCommunity to the subreddit — plain name (gaming) or prefixed (r/gaming) both work — and every search term runs only inside that community. Leave it empty to search all of Reddit.

What's the difference between searching for posts, comments, and communities?

They're three independent toggles. searchPosts (default on) returns submissions that match your keywords, searchComments returns individual matching comments with their thread context, and searchCommunities returns subreddits whose name or description matches. Enable any mix in one run; the dataType field tells each item apart.

Can I also get the comments under each post the search finds?

Yes. Turn on crawlCommentsPerPost and the scraper visits every matched post and collects its comment thread, capped by maxCommentsPerPost. Expect longer runs and more stored items when this is enabled.

How do the sort and time filters work?

searchSort mirrors Reddit's own search ranking: relevance, hot, top, new, or comments. searchTime constrains results to the hour, day, week, month, year, or all time. For monitoring, new + a tight window works best; for research, top + year or all surfaces the canonical threads.

How many results can I get per keyword?

Each search term gets its own budget: up to maxPostsCount posts (default 25, up to 50,000), maxCommentsCount comments, and maxCommunitiesCount subreddits. Set a limit to 0 to switch that result type off entirely.

Which export formats and integrations are supported?

Datasets download as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML straight from Apify. For automation, trigger and consume runs via n8n, Zapier, Make, or the REST API — and MCP-compatible AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) can call the actor as a tool through the Apify MCP server.

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More Reddit scrapers

Searching by keyword is just one way in. If your starting point is a URL, a user, or a whole community, one of these siblings will fit better:

Actor	When to use it instead
Reddit Scraper	The all-in-one: combine keyword search, direct post/profile/subreddit URLs, and full-subreddit crawls in a single run.
Reddit Comments Scraper	You already have post URLs and want every comment in the thread, nested replies included.
Reddit User Scraper	You're profiling specific Redditors — karma, account age, and their post/comment history.
Subreddit Scraper	You want a community's full post archive rather than keyword matches.

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