“Just about anybody using Google at this point will end up on Reddit at some point,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on an earnings call last year.
People congregate on Reddit to share tips, experiences, knowledge, and ephemera. It’s an increasingly rare style of online community — and one heavily mined for search results and AI training data.
Google and other search engines (though not Bing) use Reddit pages to source information for results, especially AI Overviews. Google and OpenAI also pay to license Reddit data for model training.
All of which makes Reddit an important platform for OSINT and a target for manipulation. A cottage industry of tools and agencies now claims it can seed products and messaging across Reddit to influence SEO and AI chatbots. And governments have been caught trying to influence conversations.
Reddit OSINT has changed dramatically over the past three years. The big change came when the company restricted API access to prevent AI companies from using its content without compensation. One result is that a slew of useful Reddit-focused tools stopped working.
It's similar to what happened on X after the platform curtailed its free API. On Reddit, the changes cut off Pushshift, a free archive of Reddit posts and comments that many tools relied on. A few other dead tools of note:
Unddit and Removeddit died with Pushshift.
removeddit.com now serves casino spam.
Karma Decay, a reverse image search tool focused on Reddit, is unreliable.
GummySearch stopped accepting new customers in November 2025 after failing to get a commercial API license. It will shut down completely in December 2026.
But there are still options. This guide highlights what works now, suggests third-party tools, and walks through core approaches for Reddit search and monitoring, including which LLMs to use.
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