Reddit Posts Search Scraper

Reddit Search Scraper: keyword search across Reddit, or inside one subreddit

Type a query and it returns the posts that match, as rows. Title, author, subreddit, the full post text, the permalink and the posting time, with the comments too if you ask for them.

The honest part first. The keyless run gives you up to 100 posts per search, and the public feed it reads carries no vote data, so score, numComments, upvoteRatio and flair arrive as null. Everything else on the row is filled. Add your own free Reddit app credentials and those fields fill in and the search can page past 100.

🔎 What Reddit Search Scraper does

It runs your query the way Reddit's own search box would, and writes each hit as a row. Reddit's search operators work: title:layoffs, author:spez, quotes around a phrase. Leave subreddit empty to search the whole site, or fill it in to stay inside one community.

Turn includeComments on and each post gets its comments attached, up to commentLimit. That path is paced rather than parallel, so it is noticeably slower: measured, five posts finish in about five seconds, while 100 posts take around three minutes and roughly 86 of them come back with comments. The ones that miss out carry a commentsError instead of a silently empty list.

There is no cross-run dedupe here. Run the same query twice and you get the same posts twice.

📥 What you give it

{
  "query": "best mechanical keyboard",
  "subreddit": "MechanicalKeyboards",
  "sort": "top",
  "time": "year",
  "maxItems": 50
}

query is required. Send an empty one and the run writes a BAD_INPUT row rather than searching for nothing.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run, keyless:

{
  "ok": true,
  "id": "1w4c63y",
  "title": "What's The Best Mechanical Keyboard In 2026? (Price, Switches)",
  "author": "freecoinsbabyhe",
  "subreddit": "keyboards",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards/comments/1w4c63y/whats_the_best_mechanical...",
  "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/keyboards/comments/1w4c63y/whats_the_best_mechanical...",
  "selftext": "I tried my buddy's board recently with brown tactile switches he told me last week and I actually loved that little bump not too loud but you still feel it...",
  "score": null,
  "upvoteRatio": null,
  "numComments": null,
  "createdUtc": 1788269666,
  "createdAt": "2026-09-01T13:34:26.000Z",
  "flair": null,
  "over18": null,
  "isSelf": true,
  "thumbnail": null,
  "domain": "self.keyboards",
  "source": "rss"
}

The selftext above is cut short here for reading. In a real row it holds the whole post.

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in the dataset, and only the first kind is billed.

Filter on ok == true and you have your results.

A fetch that fails writes its own coded diagnostic row with the query on it, so you can tell a failed search from a search that genuinely found nothing.

commentsError is different. It sits on a real post row that was delivered and billed, and says the comments for that one post could not be read. unavailable_429 means Reddit paced us out on that post, http_404 means the thread was gone by the time we asked.

Which fields carry a value depends on the path:

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Reddit Search Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Type your keywords into Search query. 3. Optional: put a community into Restrict to subreddit, and pick a Sort and Time window. 4. Set Max posts. Start at 25 while you check the wording of your query. 5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.891 per 1,000 posts. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per post delivered. Diagnostic rows are not billed, and a search that matches nothing produces no post rows to bill for. Comments ride on the post row, so turning includeComments on adds time but not price.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching what people say about a product or a company, in their own words rather than in a summary.
• Pulling every thread in one subreddit that mentions a term, for a support or research backlog.
• Finding the threads behind a spike, by sorting on most comments inside a tight time window.
• Collecting question posts in a niche to see what keeps getting asked.

🚧 What it does not do

• No vote data on a keyless run. score, numComments, upvoteRatio and flair are null,

and they are left empty rather than written as zero so you can tell missing from none.

• 100 posts per search while keyless. Ask for 500 and 100 is what arrives. Your own app

credentials lift that.

• No dedupe between runs. The same query on Tuesday returns Monday's posts again, and bills for

them.

• Comments are paced. On a big run some posts come back with a commentsError rather than a

comment list. Deleted comments are skipped.

• No user or subreddit browsing. This searches. To walk a subreddit or a profile in order, use

the scraper linked below.

• No private or removed content. Public posts only, as Reddit's own search sees them.

🧭 Which Reddit actor do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Reddit account? No. The credential fields are optional. They buy you the vote fields, comment scores, and paging past 100 posts.

Why are all my scores null? The keyless feed does not publish them. They are left empty on purpose, so an empty field never reads as a post with zero upvotes.

Do search operators work? Yes. title:, author:, quoted phrases, the usual Reddit set. They go in the same Search query box.

Why is my run with comments so slow? Comment feeds are paced by Reddit, not by the actor. Roughly three minutes for 100 posts. Keep commentLimit low when you are pulling a lot of posts.

Is scraping Reddit legal? This reads public posts only, never private messages or accounts. Rows can still hold personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for keeping it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a sensible starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the exact query you used and the run ID, and the log fills in the rest.