Reddit Search Scraper

Search Reddit by keyword and export the results as structured rows. Pagination is automatic.

Input

Field	Use it for
keyword	What to search for. Required.
search_type	post (default), comment, user or subreddit.
maxItems	Caps the run. Default 100. Set 0 for no limit.

{
  "keyword": "sourdough starter troubleshooting",
  "search_type": "post",
  "maxItems": 300
}

Read this before picking search_type

post and comment are the two that reliably return results. Those are the search types Reddit serves properly, and they are what this Actor is built around.

user and subreddit are accepted, but Reddit frequently returns nothing at all for them -- not an error, just an empty response. When that happens the run log says so explicitly rather than reporting a clean run that happened to save zero rows. Do not read an empty user search as "no such accounts exist".

If you need to find accounts, search post or comment for your topic and collect the author column instead. It is a longer route and a more reliable one.

Output

One row per result. Which fields are populated depends on what you searched for.

Field	Contents
id	The record's own ID
post_id	Post ID, on post and comment results
subreddit_id, subreddit	The community the result belongs to
username, author	The account behind the result
title	Post or subreddit title
created_at	Creation timestamp
score	Net score
num_comments	Comment count, on post results

{
  "id": "t3_1v03k9x",
  "post_id": "t3_1v03k9x",
  "title": "My starter smells like acetone - is it dead?",
  "author": "breadanxiety",
  "subreddit": "Sourdough",
  "created_at": "2026-07-20T14:31:07.000Z",
  "score": 842,
  "num_comments": 213
}

Rows come out flat. Reddit wraps every search hit in a layer of ranking and telemetry around the actual record; that wrapper is stripped, so the fields you want are at the top level rather than nested one deep.

Questions

Why is title empty on my comment results? Because comments do not have titles. Each search_type populates a different subset of the columns -- that is one table covering four result shapes, not fields going missing.

Why did I get fewer results than maxItems? Reddit's search stops issuing cursors well before a keyword is exhausted. The run ends when there is no next page, the page is empty, or the same cursor comes back twice.

Can I restrict the search to one subreddit? Not with an input field. Search the keyword and filter on the subreddit column afterwards, or go directly to the Subreddit Posts Scraper if you already know the community.

Can I sort or filter by date? No. Results come back in Reddit's own relevance order. Sort on created_at after the run.

Related Actors

Actor	Purpose
Reddit Post Scraper	Full detail on the posts you found, batched cheaply
Reddit Subreddit Posts Scraper	Everything in one community rather than one keyword
Reddit Feed Scraper	What is on the front page right now