Reddit Intelligence (MCP)

What does Reddit Intelligence do?

Pass a brand keyword, a subreddit, a thread URL, or a Reddit username and get back a single structured JSON object: sentiment score, top themes, pain points, praise points, trending direction, peak activity window, influential authors, top posts, and a deterministic LLM-ready markdown report. No LLM calls inside, fully reproducible. Designed to be called from an MCP agent loop (Claude, Cursor, GPT, Custom agents).

Built on Reddit's public JSON endpoints. No API key, no auth, no setup. Stable, fast, and rate-limit aware.

Why use it from an AI agent?

• Sub-15s runs for the typical 25-post analysis.
• 4 modes, one schema - the agent picks the mode and the output shape stays consistent.
• LLM-ready summary - the llm_ready.summary field is a single paragraph an agent can paste into its system prompt; llm_ready.markdown_report is a full digest a human can read.
• Deterministic - same input today, same output tomorrow (no LLM jitter, no API key burn).
• Standby-mode HTTP server - the actor runs as a true MCP-over-HTTP endpoint when invoked via Apify Standby, with a one-shot fallback for legacy invocation.

Modes

A. Keyword Monitor

What does Reddit say about my brand / competitor / product this week?

{
    "mode": "keyword_monitor",
    "keywords": ["Linear app"],
    "subreddits": ["r/SaaS", "r/startups"],
    "timeRange": "week",
    "limit": 25
}

B. Subreddit Intel

What dominates this subreddit right now?

{
    "mode": "subreddit_intel",
    "subreddit": "r/SaaS",
    "sort": "top",
    "timeRange": "month",
    "limit": 50
}

C. Thread Deep Dive

Analyze a single thread - arguments, sentiment, top voices.

{
    "mode": "thread_deep_dive",
    "postUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/<id>/title/"
}

D. User Intel

Profile a user - active subs, tone, interests.

{
    "mode": "user_intel",
    "username": "spez"
}

Output (all modes)

{
    "meta": {
        "mode": "keyword_monitor",
        "query": "Linear app",
        "timeRange": "week",
        "postsAnalyzed": 47,
        "scrapedAt": "2026-05-08T14:22:00Z"
    },
    "intelligence": {
        "sentimentScore": 0.62,
        "sentimentLabel": "mostly_positive",
        "topThemes": ["onboarding", "pricing", "support"],
        "painPoints": ["too expensive", "docs unclear"],
        "praisePoints": ["great UX", "fast API"],
        "trendingDirection": "up",
        "peakActivity": "tuesday_evening_UTC",
        "influentialAuthors": [
            { "username": "devguru", "karma": 4520, "relevance": 0.21 }
        ]
    },
    "posts": [
        {
            "id": "abc123",
            "title": "...",
            "url": "https://reddit.com/r/...",
            "subreddit": "SaaS",
            "score": 284,
            "numComments": 67,
            "sentiment": -0.42,
            "sentimentLabel": "negative",
            "summary": "User complains about pricing jump after free tier...",
            "topComment": { "body": "...", "score": 51, "author": "..." },
            "createdUtc": 1746543240
        }
    ],
    "llm_ready": {
        "summary": "47 Reddit posts analyzed for Linear app over the last week. Overall sentiment: mostly positive (81/100). ...",
        "markdown_report": "## Reddit Intelligence Report\n### Key findings..."
    }
}

No credentials needed

This Actor calls Reddit's public JSON endpoints (https://www.reddit.com/r/{sub}/hot.json, /search.json, /comments/{id}.json, /user/{u}/about.json). No Reddit app, no OAuth, no approval. You just call the Actor and it works.

Behind the scenes, requests are routed through Apify's residential proxy pool because Reddit blocks unauthenticated access from datacenter IP ranges. The proxy cost is negligible per call (~50KB of Reddit JSON per request).

A future v0.2 may add optional BYOK OAuth2 for higher rate limits and zero proxy dependency when callers need to run hundreds of requests per minute.

Pricing (PPE)

Example: a 25-post keyword monitor = $0.001 + 25 x $0.003 = $0.076/call. A 1-post thread deep dive = $0.001 + 1 x $0.003 = $0.004/call. Free tier: 100 posts/month.

Compare: Reddit-related Apify Actors charge $0.002-0.01 per result for raw scrape; this Actor delivers sentiment + themes + LLM-ready report at the same per-post tier.

Calling from an MCP agent

The Apify MCP server (mcp.apify.com) exposes this Actor as the tool call-actor with name reddit-intelligence-mcp. Typical prompt: "Use call-actor with reddit-intelligence-mcp to monitor Reddit for 'Linear app' over the last week."

For a true MCP-over-HTTP integration, the Actor's Standby endpoint accepts POST requests with the same JSON schema:

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"mode":"subreddit_intel","subreddit":"r/SaaS","limit":10}' \
  https://<actor>.apify.actor

Limits

• limit caps at 100 (Reddit's listing API hard limit per request).
• Sentiment is AFINN-based lexical scoring, not a transformer model. Strong on direction (positive vs negative), less precise on subtle sarcasm or domain-specific jargon.
• Themes are TF-IDF-derived bigrams and unigrams. They reflect lexical patterns in titles + comments, not semantic clusters.
• peakActivity is computed from the time-of-creation distribution of the analyzed posts only. For a true global peak, increase limit and use timeRange: "month".

Sources, freshness, legality

• All data comes from Reddit's public JSON endpoints at www.reddit.com/<path>.json. No HTML scraping, no Pushshift.
• The Actor exposes only public Reddit content. No personal DMs, no private subreddit content.
• User-Agent identifies the actor with a descriptive string (per Reddit's documented best practice for unauthenticated access).