Reddit market research: finding what customers actually say
Updated October 10, 2026
Reddit market research means reading the threads where your customers talk about the problem you solve, and pulling out their complaints, objections, requests and exact words. It works in four steps: find the communities, find the threads, get the whole thread into something you can work with, and read it critically. A Reddit insights tool can help with each step, but no tool replaces reading the comments, and with GummySearch closing on 2026-12-01 the set of tools has changed.
The method in four steps
1. Find where your customers talk
Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman call this Sales Safari: you go to the "watering holes" where your audience already hangs out, such as subreddits, Hacker News and niche forums, and you listen. You note their pain, their jargon, how they see the world and what they recommend to each other. You don't post or pitch.
On Reddit, start with the subreddits named in Google results for your problem, then look at the communities those threads link to. Since September 2025 Reddit shows weekly visitors and weekly contributions instead of member counts (Tubefilter, 2025-09-10), which is a better sign of how active a community really is.
2. Find the threads worth reading
Two kinds of search work:
- Google. Search your problem plus
site:reddit.com, or phrases people use when they're frustrated: "tired of", "switched from", "alternative to", "worth it". Google's own documentation (updated 2025-12-10) notes thatsite:doesn't return every page on a site, so try a few phrasings. - Reddit search. It supports
subreddit:,title:,selftext:,author:,site:,url:andflair:, and you can search inside a single post's comments (Reddit Help, "Available search features", edited 2026-10-05).
Prefer threads where people argue or compare options. "Which CRM did you switch to and why?" teaches you more than a single review.
3. Get the whole thread, not the first screen
Big threads hide most of their replies behind "load more comments" and "continue this thread", and the best details are often three levels down. Copying the page gets you the first screen. Exporting the thread gets you the rest, with scores and who replied to whom. Our guide to downloading a whole Reddit thread covers the options.
4. Mine it like reviews
Copywriter Joanna Wiebe popularised review mining (Copyhackers, 2014): go through reviews, copy exact phrases, and sort them into what people love, what they hate and what worries them. It works the same on Reddit threads. Keep a sheet with four columns: the problem, the exact words, how many people said something similar, and the link to the comment.
Reddit keyword research
"Reddit keyword research" means two different things, and both are useful.
Which Reddit threads rank on Google. Google added a "Discussions and forums" feature in 2022. In Ahrefs' study of 145 million US search results (2026-08-27), 11.7% of results pages showed it, and Reddit appeared in 87.8% of those in the US. Almost all of those searches were informational. If a thread ranks for your topic, it's a thread your customers are reading, and the comments tell you what they want from a page on that topic.
Which words your customers use. Threads give you the vocabulary for ads, landing pages and SEO: how people name the problem, the product category and the competitors. The phrase people actually type is often different from the one you'd write. A "reddit keyword research tool" in this sense is anything that lets you collect those phrases at volume, which in practice means exporting threads and searching across them.
Reddit insights tools in 2026
| Tool | What it does | Cost | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reddit Pro Trends | Tracks keywords, shows matching posts and comments, top communities and an AI summary of themes | Free for eligible businesses | English only; its terms say you may not download other users' posts or comments, and the data is for internal use |
| Reddit Answers (Reddit's AI search) | Answers questions from Reddit content via the Ask button | Free | 10 questions a week logged out, 50 a day logged in |
| GummySearch | Grouped audiences and themes such as pain points and solution requests across about 130,000 subreddits | Closed to new users | Shuts down 2026-12-01 and deletes all data, because it couldn't reach an API agreement with Reddit |
| Comment Scraper (ours) | Exports threads you open to CSV, JSON or Markdown; optional AI brief grouping themes, objections and requests, each with the exact comments behind it | Free exports; Personal $12 a month | Works one thread at a time (or your open tabs on Personal); doesn't monitor or search Reddit for you |
| Your own AI chat | Paste or upload an exported thread into Claude or ChatGPT | Your existing plan | Only as good as the export and the prompt |
Sources: Reddit Help pages for Reddit Pro Trends and Reddit Answers (edited 2026-10-05) and GummySearch's closing announcement (2025-11-06). For monitoring and lead tools, see our GummySearch alternatives, sorted by what you used GummySearch for.
Prompts for analysing threads with AI
AI is good at sorting hundreds of comments into themes. It's also good at making up a quote that sounds right. Anthropic's own advice for long documents is to have the model pull word-for-word quotes first, reason only from them, and drop any claim it can't support with a quote (Claude documentation on reducing hallucinations). Numbered comments make that checkable.
With a thread exported as numbered Markdown, a prompt like this works well:
Below is a Reddit thread. Each comment starts with an ID like [c12], its score and its age.
List the problems people describe, most common first. For each:
1. A short name for the problem
2. One sentence on what goes wrong for them
3. Roughly how many comments raise it
4. Two or three comment IDs that show it, in the commenters' own words
Only use what's in the thread. If you can't point to a comment, leave the point out.
Then open two or three of the cited comments and check that they say what the AI claims.
What to watch out for
Reddit is a biased sample, and AI summaries can make the bias worse.
- Loud minorities. In most online communities about 90% of people only read, 9% post occasionally and 1% write most of the content (Nielsen Norman Group). The people complaining in a thread aren't all your customers.
- Upvotes snowball. In a randomised experiment, one early upvote raised a comment's final rating by 25% on average (Muchnik, Aral and Taylor, Science, 2013). Another study found 73% of Reddit post votes were cast without opening the post. Score tells you what got attention, not what's true.
- AI search favours popular comments. A University of Illinois audit of Reddit's AI search (reported 2026-09-17) found the comments it cited sat around the 91st percentile by score, against the 45th for comments it didn't cite. Reddit's own summaries lean towards what's already upvoted.
- The middle of a long thread gets less attention. Language models use information at the start and end of a long input better than in the middle (Liu et al., 2023). Split big threads into parts, or use a tool that analyses them in chunks.
- Deleted comments disappear. A thread you read today may lose comments tomorrow. Keep your own export with links if a quote matters.
A worked example
This is a made-up example of what the output of the method looks like, for a thread about choosing a CRM:
| Theme | About how many comments | Example comments |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal price jumps after year one | 14 | [c1] "We left our CRM after the renewal doubled." |
| Email sync decides who stays | 11 | [c6] "Logging calls by hand never lasted more than a week." |
| Per-seat pricing hurts agencies | 7 | [c8] "Three people use it daily and ten log in once a month." |
Every row points to comments you can open and read. That's the difference between research you can act on and a summary you have to trust.
Questions
What is a Reddit insights tool? Anything that helps you find, collect or summarise Reddit discussions for research: Reddit's own Pro Trends and AI search, exporters that pull whole threads, and AI chats you analyse those exports in.
Is GummySearch still available? No. It stopped taking new customers on 2025-11-30 and shuts down on 2026-12-01.
How do I do keyword research on Reddit? Find the threads Google ranks for your topic, export them, and collect the phrases people use for the problem, the category and the competitors. Reddit's search operators help you find more threads.
Can I use Reddit data for market research? Reddit's terms prohibit collecting data without permission, and its Public Content Policy says commercial uses need a conversation with Reddit. Our page on whether it's legal to scrape Reddit covers what that means for reading and exporting threads.