Reddit: An In-Depth Guide to Searching and Monitoring

Jemma Ward
3 minutes ago
12 min read

This blog will cover investigation and monitoring techniques for Reddit content, including tools and tradecraft, and investigate how Reddit as a platform can provide unique insights for OSINT practitioners. As in our previous platform-focused blogs (Discord, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon), we’ll consider both tradecraft and third-party tools and weigh up the merits of using each.

Branded as the ‘front page of the internet’, Reddit functions as a topic-driven discussion board and, arguably, as a social media platform too – though Reddit itself has claimed otherwise, in a bid to avoid restriction under social media laws. The platform has been around since 2005 (a long time in internet years!) and continues to grow; as of October 2025, Reddit’s number of active users per day was 116 million, a 19% increase from the previous year.

Reddit’s Structure

Reddit’s structure is broadly hierarchical – it consists of subforums, known as subreddits, which are usually organised around specific topics or themes. The names of the subreddits themselves are user-created – so while some subreddits do ‘what they say on the box’ (i.e. r/news is for discussing news items and recent events, and r/Sydney is for discussing topics related to the city of Sydney), others may seem a little peculiar (r/holdmycatnip, for example!).

Registered users can subscribe to subreddits of interest so that content shows up in their user feed – but for public subreddits, users can still engage and interact with content without subscribing. Beneath each post and comment are arrows which allow users to ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ content – basically a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. Content that is seen as irrelevant or inaccurate is likely to be downvoted (find out more about ‘Reddiquette’ here).

Reddit without an Account

Reddit remains one of the most open and accessible platforms for searching and viewing content without an account. Over-18 and Not Safe for Work (NSFW) content isn’t (technically) accessible to unregistered users, however a workaround exists (for the time being, at least). If you attempt to view a post, but see the pop-up and blurred page below, navigate to the classic version of Reddit by adding ‘old’ as a subdomain at the beginning of the URL.

Using the ‘old’ Reddit usually allows unregistered users to click through to view NSFW content.

We can also use Reddit’s advanced search operators without logging in (more on Reddit searching later), and view user pages. So, given that we don’t need an account to browse or search for content, is there any point to registration? For most OSINT practitioners, probably not. However, there are still some use cases where an account might help, especially if you need to:

Curate a feed of specific content and monitor subreddits directly.
Interact with posts and comments.
Craft an online persona to gain access to private subreddits.
Join chats (Reddit only allows private group chats – public chat channels were removed in October last year).

Account Registration and OPSEC

It’s relatively straightforward to create a Reddit account, and temporary mail providers, like Temp Mail and 10MinuteMail will allow you to register and receive a verification code. New users aren’t required to provide personal information – in fact, during the sign-up process, users are reminded that Reddit is an ‘anonymous’ platform. While you can choose a unique username, a pre-filled, randomised username is automatically provided.

As always, keep OPSEC and attribution in mind. While anonymity is an oft-touted feature of Reddit, the platform itself collects information about its users, including activity, IP address, device, and interactions with advertising. Additionally, commenting and engaging with content may reveal relative attribution indicators – your behaviours, the language you use, likely location, educational background, and more.

Searching Reddit Posts and Comments

In 2024, following a 60 billion dollar deal allowing Google to train its AI on Reddit content, Reddit restricted other search engines from indexing its content. As a result, Google is our search engine of choice when it comes to locating Reddit content.

Reddit's robots.txt file now disallows (non-Google) search engines from indexing Reddit content.

Using Google’s advanced search operators is an effective way to retrieve content from Reddit. We can use the site: operator to target reddit.com and then add in keywords and other parameters required. In the screenshot below, we’ve combined the site: operator with intitle: and after: to target recent, topic-specific posts from any subreddits.

If you only want to retrieve content from specific subreddits, add the path to your domain.

Where Google searching comes (a little bit) unstuck for us is searching for specific Reddit users’ activity. While we can certainly target usernames in our search strings, results pulled back will include any mentions of the user, rather than their individual comments. In the example below, searching for the username ‘PresidentObama’ (created for Barack Obama for an ‘Ask Me Anything’ post in 2012) retrieves hundreds of comments about the account, rather than content posted by the account.

This is where it’s best to hop into the platform itself. There are two options for viewing a user’s comments and posts. We can go straight to the user’s profile and, provided their posts and comments are public, see all their contributions over time. To view a user’s profile page, visit: reddit.com/user/UsernameHere

As you can see in the screenshot above, we can select to view posts or comments, and sort contributions by ‘Hot’ (recent posts with high engagement), ‘Top’ (most upvoted posts), and ‘New’ (most recent posts). We can also conduct keyword searches within that user’s posts and comments to refine our results.

Note: By default, Reddit users’ posts and comments are visible – but in June last year, the platform introduced a feature allowing users to hide their contributions.) Up until recently, there was a workaround for this too (search for a space or expected word within the user’s profile!), but Reddit seems to have fixed this bug (we’ll touch on a couple of third party tools that can help retrieve content from private accounts soon).

Reddit Advanced Search

Reddit also has its own built-in search language. Below, you can see some of the most useful search operators.

Like Google dorking, we can ‘stack’ operators. In the screenshot below, you can see a search targeting an author’s posts containing a submitted URL.

Reddit’s built-in search also supports Boolean operators. Use AND, OR, or NOT to further refine searches (parentheses can also be helpful to ‘force’ results when crafting more complex search strings). In the example below, we can retrieve results from the r/news subreddit OR the r/worldnews subreddit, containing submitted links to cnn[.]com OR bbc[.]com.

Note: We’ve found that Reddit often ‘fills in the gaps’ when it comes to Boolean searching – searches with doubled-up operators generally default to ‘OR’. We recommend experimenting with a variety of search syntax.

Used in conjunction with Google dorking, Reddit’s advanced search operators can help refine your results, and filter content from highly active users and subreddits.

Capturing Timestamps

Fuzzy timestamps for Reddit posts and comments are readily visible; however, in OSINT investigations, we usually want to record the exact time that something was posted. Simply hovering over a fuzzy timestamp will reveal the exact time of posting:

This isn’t ideal for copying and pasting, however, so we recommend grabbing the timestamp using your browser’s built-in developer tools.

To bring up the developer tools pane in Chrome, either use the shortcut ‘Ctrl + Shift + I’, or simply right-click and choose ‘Inspect’.
With the ‘Elements’ tab open, use the ‘Select’ tool (arrow in the top left of the pane) to select the fuzzy timestamp.
Copy and past the datetime field from the HTML.

Third Party Tools

Since Reddit began charging developers for API access in 2023, third party tools for Reddit have become less effective, and many have disappeared entirely. Still, there are some useful ones available. Some can even assist with retrieving comments from private user profiles.

Below is a selection of browser-based Reddit tools that may come in handy in investigations (find them in our OSINT Bookmark Stack here):

Reddit Comment Search retrieves comments from user accounts. It’s worth using this tool when investigating private Reddit accounts – while unlikely to retrieve every comment or post, it often brings back a selection of interactions, including comments that may have been deleted.
Reddit User Analyser provides a handy snapshot of a user’s account, including the subreddits they post in, their most frequently used words, and activity over time.
PullPush can also retrieve some private user activity, although this tends to be older content – quite useful for accounts with a long history of posting, but less so for new accounts.
Reveddit is a browser extension that can provide some limited insight into comment removals. As of early 2026, it will no longer retrieve deleted comments but will show if a comment is user-deleted or removed by a moderator. The extension requires users to be logged into a Reddit account.

Monitoring Trends and Events

For some OSINT practitioners, tracking online conversations and trends is more important than investigating individuals. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen numerous examples of how monitoring online commentary and content around events has enabled more effective understanding of emerging situations.

The Arab Spring in the early 2010s is often regarded as a turning point for how technology and social media changed the reporting landscape, with citizen media increasingly playing a role in journalism and monitoring.

With thousands of posts per day, and upwards of 450 million unique users per week, Reddit is a mecca of discussion on current events, technology, brands, locations, and hobbies. For event, topic or area-focused OSINT, practitioners can use Reddit commentary to better understand community responses to emerging situations and gain a more holistic picture of the information environment. Dedicated monitoring of Reddit conversations can assist with:

Conflict monitoring and area assessments
Disinformation and misinformation research
Understanding online trends
Brand metrics and sentiment analysis
Defensive security and vulnerability scanning

We’ve already covered the main approaches for searching Reddit content – using keywords and phrases to identify subreddits and posts of interest is the first step for monitoring situations and events, because, of course, we need to know what to monitor.

As an example, we may have a requirement to monitor local reactions to Iranian strikes against Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. While news and current events subreddits (like r/worldnews) may have more up-to-date global reporting on topics, location-based subreddits are far more valuable for understanding moods and reactions on the ground.

To identify subreddits of interest for monitoring, search for relevant keywords in Reddit and select the ‘Communities’ tab (keep in mind that some regions with restrictions around Reddit access will have a much smaller presence on the platform). Below, you can see just a few of the UAE-related subreddits.

To ensure you’re monitoring the right conversations, you’ll need to spend a little time in the discovery phase – you might want to pay attention to activity levels in a community of interest (no point monitoring a dead subreddit!), languages spoken, key topics of discussion, and key contributors.

Once you’ve developed an understanding of the environment, and know which parts of Reddit, along with the relevant keywords, you want to monitor, the next step is deciding on your monitoring approach. Manual monitoring (which, in my world, looks like multiple open tabs in my browser than I flick between and refresh intermittently) might be sufficient for your needs. However, for longer term keyword and subreddit monitoring, you may want to use dedicated tools – we’ve listed a few free, accessible options below.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great way to monitor content indexed by Google. We can craft search strings (using any of the Google operators) and have alerts delivered via either email or RSS (Really Simple Syndication). In the example below, I’ve created an alert for conflict-relevant keywords in the Abu Dhabi subreddit.

Note: To view an RSS feed, you’ll need a feedreader. A feedreader is an application or tool that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds – popular options include Feedly, Classic Outlook, and Feedbin, Feeder is a free Chrome extension that doesn’t require a login.

Here’s an example of a Google Alerts feed delivered via RSS – we can see a selection of recently indexed search results that match the search string: site:reddit.com “Abu Dhabi”

The downside of using Google Alerts to monitor specific search strings is that you’ll be waiting for Google to index the content – for weekly monitoring activities, this is likely adequate, but if you want real time updates, it may not be ideal.

Reddit RSS Feeds

If RSS is your preferred format for receiving updates, you can also create feeds for Reddit posts, users and subreddits. Just add .rss to the end of the Reddit URL that you want to monitor and subscribe to the feed. In the image below, we’ve added the suffix .rss to the r/abudhabi subreddit URL in Feeder, which gives us the option to follow the feed.

F5Bot

For keyword monitoring on Reddit, F5Bot is a simple, albeit quite basic, solution. Like other alerting and monitoring tools, it allows us to set up monitors based on specific search terms. The free tier doesn’t offer very much in the way of sophisticated or complex content retrieval, but if all you need to do is monitor Reddit for keyword mentions (for example, the name of a brand, individual, company or location), it gets the job done!

In the image below, you can see posts and comments retrieved from Reddit featuring the keyword ‘OSINT’. F5Bot handily includes the context, timestamp, and the title of the post in question.

Tip: Aim for unique, highly relevant monitoring terms. Generic keywords, like ‘drone’ or ‘tank’, will pile up quickly, and you’ll reach the daily alert limit for the free tier within minutes.

RddDeck

RddDeck is the Reddit version of TweetDeck (now called X Pro). While it doesn’t offer much in the way of detailed keyword monitoring, it’s a solid option if you want to track activity on relevant subreddits without creating a Reddit account. The image below shows a Reddit deck set up to monitor r/abudhabi, r/dubai, r/Kuwait, r/saudiarabia, and r/UAE.

Citizen journalism and the use of social media as both a broadcast platform and political medium makes platform monitoring an integral part of the puzzle when it comes to understanding reactions, trends and local issues. Make sure to consider Reddit as a platform of interest when it comes to monitoring the online environment!

AI and Reddit

We can’t really talk about the latest OSINT tradecraft without mentioning generative AI, right? OSINT Combine has already published a variety of blogs highlighting some of the opportunities and challenges for practitioners when it comes to harnessing AI for OSINT workflows (Why AI Agreeableness Poses Risks to OSINT Work, The Real Role of AI in OSINT Workflows, Introducing Perspectives: AI and Intelligence Analysis) and, these days, it pays to look for opportunities to incorporate AI tools into platform monitoring.

The good news is that Reddit content is easily retrievable by AI – in fact, in October 2025, Reddit was the most-cited source across major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.

Generative AI can be an effective way to search and aggregate content while filtering out some of the noise. The output below is an example of how readily AI can process and format Reddit sources. I prompted ChatGPT to provide (in CSV format) a selection of 20-30 recent, location-specific Reddit posts that provided insight into reactions of the Gulf States to Iranian strikes in the region.

In terms of quick and easy content retrieval, this was a win – however, information collated by AI may be lacking context, and there’s no guarantee that it’s representative of the whole picture. AI can speed up some of our workflows, but we still need to check, verify, and most importantly think about the results it delivers.

Summary

Reddit is a growing discussion platform that can yield valuable insights for OSINT practitioners. Described as the ‘front page of the internet’, it is also undoubtedly a broad church, host to diverse communities, topics and behaviours.

As a relatively open platform, we can search and access content with very few restrictions. While third-party tools for Reddit are limited, they can still assist with investigating accounts and deleted content. Monitoring tools and approaches can also help us better understand and track conversations, topics and trends across the platform. As always, OSINT tradecraft is an evolving space, and keeping abreast of new approaches, tools (including AI) and techniques for collection is one of the most important (and fun!) parts of our job.

If you’re keen to take your OSINT collection and tradecraft to the next level, get in touch with us at training@osintcombine.com or explore our training courses to find the perfect fit for your organisation.