Reddit Comments Search Scraper & API: Find & Monitor Comments

Reddit Comments Search Scraper: Find Comments by Keyword

Type keywords and get the Reddit comments that contain them, on all of Reddit or inside one subreddit: comment text, score, author, date, the comment it replies to, and the title and link of its post. No login, no cookies, no API key. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the Apify API.

• Comments, not posts: Reddit's own comment search, with a record per comment. Each one carries postTitle, postUrl and parentId, so you know where it was written and what it answers.
• Exact words when you need them: Reddit's search is loose. Turn on strict search and only comments with every word of your query, as whole words, are kept (the others are not charged). Quotes keep a phrase together, -word excludes, OR groups alternatives.
• One subreddit or all of Reddit: name a subreddit in Search only inside this subreddit, or leave it empty.
• Newest first, in a date window: with the New sort, the time range and the date fields cut the reading at the right moment, so a watch on a brand name stays cheap.
• Only new comments on a schedule: turn on Only new since the last run and each run returns and charges only the comments earlier runs did not return.

$2.50 per 1,000 comments, less on paid plans, plus $0.005 per run. Searches that fail, duplicates, and comments removed by your filters are not charged.

Optional AI analysis of each comment (sentiment, intent, entities, summary, pain point, business signals, your own labels): $0.50 per 1,000 analyzed records.

What people use it for

• Brand and product mentions: every comment that names your product, a competitor or a keyword, with the link to reply or to read the whole thread.
• Research on what people say: pain points, workarounds and wishes about a topic, in the words of the people who write them.
• Finding conversations to join: comments in a subreddit that ask for a tool or a recommendation.
• Feeding a spreadsheet, a CRM or an LLM with real comments instead of whole threads.

How to search Reddit comments by keyword

1. Type keywords into Comment search, one search per line. Quotes keep a phrase together: "home assistant".
2. Optionally name a subreddit, turn on strict search, and choose a sort (Relevance, Top or New).
3. Click Start and read the comments in the run's Output tab.

Through the API:

{
  "commentSearchQueries": ["\"home assistant\""],
  "searchSubreddit": "homeassistant",
  "strictSearch": true,
  "searchSort": "new",
  "maxPostsPerSource": 100
}

A brand watch, each day, only the new comments, without the ones that mention a word you do not want:

{
  "commentSearchQueries": ["\"vaultwarden\""],
  "searchSort": "new",
  "timeFilter": "day",
  "strictSearch": true,
  "excludeKeywords": ["bitwarden"],
  "onlyNew": true,
  "watchName": "vaultwarden-mentions"
}

Like any Actor on Apify, it can be scheduled, connected to webhooks, Make, Zapier, n8n, or called by AI agents through Apify's MCP server.

Output

One record per comment. A real result (October 21, 2026, author replaced, text shortened, some fields left out):

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "19rfyxigm2blu",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1xbrwmv/letting_alexa_into_home_assistant/19rfyxigm2blu/",
  "postId": "1xbrwmv",
  "postTitle": "Letting Alexa into Home Assistant",
  "postUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1xbrwmv/letting_alexa_into_home_assistant/",
  "parentId": "t3_1xbrwmv",
  "parentType": "post",
  "subreddit": "homeassistant",
  "author": "example_user",
  "body": "You can convert old Echo Dots to Voice satellites via EchoMuse. I bought 3 from eBay for $15/ea. …",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-21T16:58:21Z",
  "score": 2,
  "isSubmitter": false,
  "source": "comment search: home assistant (r/homeassistant)"
}

Field	What it holds
body, score, createdAt, author	the comment as written, its score, its date and its author
url, permalink	the link to the comment itself
postId, postTitle, postUrl, postAuthor	the post it was written under
parentId, parentType	what it replies to: the post (t3_…) or another comment (t1_…)
isSubmitter, stickied, distinguished, isEdited	whether the author wrote the post, and the comment's state
source	the search that found the comment

depth and rootCommentId are null here: Reddit's comment search does not say where a comment sits in its thread. To read a whole thread, use the Reddit Comments Scraper with postUrl. Field names stay the same between runs: a value Reddit does not provide is null, not missing. The run summary (what was found, what failed and why) is the OUTPUT record of the run's key-value store.

AI analysis (optional)

Turn on AI analysis and every comment gets an aiAnalysis object next to its own fields: language, sentiment and score, emotion, intent (question, seeking_recommendation, complaint, praise, purchase_intent, comparison…), category, topics, named brands, products and people, a one-sentence English summary, the pain point, and business signals (wantsHelp, buyingSignal, mentionsPrice, featureRequest, isVendor), plus a relevance score from 0 to 1 against your search and up to 5 yes/no labels of your own, as {"label_name": "what makes it true"}.

$0.50 per 1,000 analyzed records, every field included. Deleted, removed, bot (AutoModerator) and empty comments are not analyzed and not charged. If an analysis fails, the comment is still delivered and charged as usual, its aiAnalysisStatus is failed with the reason in aiAnalysisError, and the analysis is not charged. Any language in, summaries in English; the first ~2,500 characters of a long comment are analyzed. It adds time: expect one to five minutes per 100 comments.

Inputs

• Comment search: keywords to find in comments, one search per line. Search only inside this subreddit.
• Strict search (exact words only), and where the words must appear. Excluded keywords.
• Max comments per search and Max results in total.
• Search sort (Relevance, Top, New) and Time range. Posted after / before and Comments posted after / before: both date windows apply to a comment found.
• Include NSFW (off by default; the NSFW flag is the post's).
• AI analysis and Your own labels.
• Only new since the last run and Watch name, for scheduled runs.

Pricing

Pay per event:

Apify plan	Comments
Free	$2.50 / 1,000
Starter	$2.40 / 1,000
Scale	$2.30 / 1,000
Business and above	$2.20 / 1,000

AI analysis (optional): $0.50 / 1,000 analyzed records on every plan.

Plus the start: $0.005 per GB of run memory. Not charged: searches that fail, error records, duplicates, comments removed by strict search or by a filter, results already returned to a watch. Set Maximum cost per run in the run options and the run stops before going over it.

Run it in production

Keep one saved input and let Apify run it on a schedule.

1. In Apify Console open Schedules and create a schedule with a cron time (0 6 * * * is every day at 06:00 UTC, 0 6 * * 1 every Monday).
2. Add this Actor with your input. Turn on Only new since the last run and give a Watch name: runs with the same name share one memory, so you can add or remove a source later without getting old results again. Without a watch name, changing the input starts a new memory and returns everything again.
3. With Only new, Max comments per search is the window watched: keep it above the number of new results you expect between two runs. Without Only new, set Comments posted after to the length of your rhythm (1 day for a daily run, 7 days for a weekly one) and remove the overlap on id in your own storage.

What it costs per month (Free plan prices; Business prices in brackets). Each run costs its start ($0.005) plus the comments it returns. With Only new since the last run, only new ones are returned and charged, so the cost follows how much new content there is:

Schedule	New comments per month	Cost per month
Daily (30 runs)	1,000	$2.65 ($2.35)
Daily (30 runs)	10,000	$25.15 ($22.15)
Weekly (4 runs)	1,000	$2.52 ($2.22)

Optional AI analysis adds $0.50 per 1,000 records analyzed. Set Maximum cost per run so that a run never goes over what you planned.

Call it from code. Start a run and wait for the results in one request (this call waits up to 300 seconds, so use it for small jobs):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/quarra~reddit-comments-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"commentSearchQueries": ["\"acme crm\""], "strictSearch": true, "searchSort": "new", "timeFilter": "day", "maxPostsPerSource": 100, "onlyNew": true, "watchName": "acme-comments"}'

For bigger jobs, start the run, wait for it to end, then read its dataset:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("quarra/reddit-comments-search-scraper").call(run_input={"commentSearchQueries": ["\"acme crm\""], "strictSearch": True, "searchSort": "new", "timeFilter": "day", "maxPostsPerSource": 100, "onlyNew": True, "watchName": "acme-comments"})
items = list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())

Connect it. Add a webhook on the event ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED (Console, Integrations tab) to be called when a run ends, then read the dataset of that run. Make, Zapier and n8n have Apify modules: run the Actor, get the dataset items, then send each one to Slack, Google Sheets, Airtable or your CRM. AI agents can call the Actor through Apify's MCP server.

Send results to Slack, Notion or Discord

Pick one of your Apify MCP connectors in "Send results to your app" (Notion connects in one click), or paste a Slack, Discord, Make, Zapier or n8n webhook URL. After each successful run, a summary lands there: the number of results, the first 25 with their links, and a link to the full dataset. Schedule the Actor with "Only new since the last run (monitoring)" turned on and new results reach your team every day without opening Apify.

Limits

• Reddit lists a limited number of comments per search: "home assistant" with the New sort and a one-week range stopped at 230 comments (October 21, 2026), all from the last four hours. To go further back, cut the time into windows with the date fields and run one search per window.
• Dates and time range only cut the reading with the New sort. With Relevance or Top, Reddit ignores them: the date fields still filter the results, but the search does not go looking for older or newer ones.
• Reading is paced: about 10 comments per page, 230 comments in 4 minutes 40 seconds on Apify (October 21, 2026).
• Strict search checks words, not meaning; quotes around a phrase fix most false matches.
• Quarantined communities are visible to logged-in accounts only. The Actor reports them and does not log in.

FAQ

Why did I get zero comments? Check these: strict search drops the comments that do not contain every word; a Time range or Posted after date leaves nothing in the window (dates only cut the reading with the New sort); Excluded keywords removed them; with Only new, every comment found was already returned by an earlier run of the same Watch name. The status message and the OUTPUT record give the reason for each search, and a run with no result costs the start only.

How is this different from the Reddit Search Scraper? It only searches comments, and its form is built around that. The Reddit Search Scraper searches posts first, with the comments of each post as an option.

Can I search comments in one subreddit only? Yes: Search only inside this subreddit takes selfhosted, r/selfhosted or its link.

How do I get only the comments that contain my exact phrase? Turn on strict search and put the phrase in quotes. Comments that do not contain it are dropped and never charged.

Do I need a Reddit account or API key? No account, no cookies, no API key. Platform costs are included in the price.

Is it legal? It collects public comments any logged-out visitor can see. Reddit's terms and privacy law (GDPR in the EU) apply to how you use the data.

Does the Actor send anything to Quarra? Only when a run fails or runs out of time: the Actor, its build, the error type, the line of our code where it happened, and the memory and time the run was given, so we can fix it fast. Never your input, your results, your account or the run ID.

Related Actors

• Reddit Scraper: subreddits, searches, post URLs and users in one Actor.
• Reddit Search Scraper: posts and comments by keyword.
• Reddit Comments Scraper: all the comments of posts from their links.
• Reddit Subreddit Scraper: the posts of any subreddit.
• Reddit Post Scraper: posts from their links, or refreshed by ID to follow their score.
• Reddit Lead Finder: the posts and comments where people ask for a recommendation or show buying intent.