Reddit Social Listening API
Monitor Reddit posts and comments mentioning your brand, product, or competitors across any subreddit — for brand sentiment tracking, competitive intelligence, or crisis-response monitoring.
How the Reddit Social Listening API Workflow Works
Reddit's own JSON API (append .json to any URL) returns structured post and comment data without JavaScript rendering, making it one of the cheapest sources for social listening at scale. Search a subreddit (or reddit.com/search) for your brand or competitor keywords, then walk the returned post URLs' .json endpoints to pull full comment threads. Track mention_count and average sentiment (computed downstream by your own NLP pipeline — AlterLab returns raw text, not sentiment scores) over rolling time windows to spot spikes tied to product launches, outages, or PR events.
Recommended Tier & Cost
Reddit's .json endpoints avoid full rendering for most read operations, but the site applies IP-based rate limiting on high-volume access, so requests are recommended at Tier 3 (residential proxy rotation) for sustained social-listening jobs rather than Tier 1, which can hit rate limits quickly at scale.
Sample Output
{
"subreddit": "r/webdev",
"post_id": "1a2b3c4",
"title": "Anyone else migrated off [Competitor] recently?",
"author": "example_user",
"score": 342,
"num_comments": 87,
"created_utc": "2026-07-09T18:22:00Z",
"top_comment": {
"body": "We switched last quarter, mostly for pricing reasons.",
"score": 54
}
}Need an API key? — no credit card required.
Responsible Use
AlterLab is designed for extracting publicly available data. Always review the terms of service for Reddit, respect robots.txt directives, and ensure your use case complies with applicable laws in your jurisdiction. Do not use this service to access non-public, authenticated, or personally identifiable data without appropriate authorization.
Quick Start
# Always verify Reddit's robots.txt and terms of service before extracting data.
curl -X POST https://alterlab.io/api/v1/scrape \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/top/.json",
"advanced": { "render_js": true }
}'Frequently Asked Questions
Can I monitor mentions across all of Reddit, not just one subreddit?
Yes — use Reddit's site-wide search endpoint rather than a single subreddit URL to catch mentions across any community, then filter results by relevance to your brand or product keywords.
Does this include comment threads, or just post titles?
Full comment threads are included — appending .json to a post's permalink URL returns the nested comment tree, which is where most brand sentiment and detailed feedback actually lives.
How do I avoid Reddit's rate limits at scale?
AlterLab's tier escalation and built-in request pacing handle this automatically — spreading requests over time rather than bursting is the standard mitigation, and residential proxy rotation (Tier 3) further reduces throttling risk for high-volume monitoring.
Related Guides
Developer Scraping Resources
How to Scrape Reddit Data: Complete Guide
Step-by-step tutorial with Python and Node.js code examples, structured extraction, and cost breakdown for Reddit scraping.
How to Handle Bot Protection Challenges
All 6 detection layers explained: TLS fingerprinting, JS challenges, Turnstile, and more.
JavaScript Rendering API
Full browser rendering for SPAs, React, and dynamic content.
Python Web Scraping API
pip install alterlab — async-ready Python SDK with 5,000 free scrapes.
Pricing
From $0.0002/request. No subscriptions. Balance never expires.
Your first scrape.
Sixty seconds.
$1 free credit — up to 5,000 scrapes. No credit card.
Just a POST request.
No credit card required · $1 free credit, up to 5,000 scrapes · Balance never expires