How to Find Reddit Posts by Keyword

This is for anyone trying to find existing Reddit posts and comments on a specific topic — for research, competitive analysis, or lead-finding — and running into the limits of Reddit's built-in search bar.

Reddit's search defaults to a relevance ranking that weighs recency and engagement, which means older or lower-engagement posts can be effectively invisible even if they match your keyword exactly. It also searches post titles and bodies more thoroughly than it searches comment text, so a highly relevant answer buried in a comment thread often won't surface at all, even though the discussion is exactly what you were looking for.

• `subreddit:name` — restrict results to one subreddit, e.g. subreddit:smallbusiness pricing question.
• Quotation marks — search for an exact phrase rather than the individual words separately.
• `author:username` — find everything a specific user has posted, useful for research or checking someone's posting history.
• Sort and time filters — switching from "relevance" to "new" and adjusting the time window can surface recent posts that relevance ranking would otherwise bury.

Sitewide search is useful for broad discovery — finding out which subreddits discuss a topic at all. Once you know the relevant subreddit, searching within it (using the community's own search box, scoped to "this community") tends to return more focused, relevant results with less noise, since it's not competing against unrelated subreddits using the same words in a different context.

A lot of the most useful signal on Reddit — a candid answer, a specific recommendation, a detailed complaint — lives in comments rather than post titles, and native search under-indexes that content. Dedicated comment search tools, like the Reddit Comment Search tool, query comment text directly for a keyword or phrase and can surface matches that would never appear from the Reddit search bar alone.

Someone researching how people talk about a specific software category searches Reddit's default search and finds mostly recent, high-upvote posts. Switching to comment search for the same phrase surfaces dozens of older, more candid comments buried inside unrelated post threads — comments that never would have appeared using title-only search, but that contain much more specific, useful detail.

• Assuming a keyword with zero results means no one is discussing the topic, rather than that native search missed it.
• Searching sitewide when a subreddit-scoped search would return more relevant results.
• Overlooking comment-only discussions because they don't surface in title-focused search.
• Not adjusting the sort order away from the default relevance ranking when looking for recent activity.

• Try both sitewide and subreddit-scoped searches for the same phrase.
• Search with quotation marks for exact phrasing, and without for broader coverage.
• Sort by "new" as well as "relevance" to catch recent activity.
• Use a dedicated comment search tool for anything relevance-ranked search seems to be missing.

For ongoing tracking of new posts and comments going forward, rather than searching Reddit's history, see how to monitor Reddit keywords.