How we research Reddit

updated 1 November 2026

Our Reddit guides are built from two things: threads where people discuss a question in public, and our own scans of public posts. We read the threads, and when we quote someone we use their exact words and link to the post. Sellers promoting their own tools are left out. Any numbers come from our scans and carry the dates they were collected. Each step is described below, so you can decide how much weight to give what we write.

In a quiet library, a researcher at a long table uses a magnifying glass to compare several identical leaves gathered in a basket, while a small sieve beside them separates a few leaves into a discard tray.

Which threads we read

We start from the question a guide answers, for example "which tool do people use to monitor Reddit for their keywords". Then we search Reddit for the ways people phrase it, sorted by relevance and by top score over the past year. A thread needs at least 5 upvotes and 5 comments to count. We read the most upvoted of those in full, top comments included.

We also check what Google shows for the matching search, because most readers will see the threads it ranks. For the guides published on 1 November 2026, we read about 50 threads across five topics: finding clients, Reddit monitoring tools, social listening, lead generation tools and market research.

A thread only samples the people who chose to post. It tells you what they found, not what holds for everyone, and we write it up on those terms.

How we choose and check quotes

Every quote on our pages is someone's exact words, copied from the thread. It's under 25 words, credited to their username and community, and linked to the comment. We don't fix spelling, and we don't stitch together sentences from different parts of a comment.

Before a page goes live, we check every quote for an exact match against the thread text we saved. In our first batch, about a third of the lines a first pass had marked as quotes failed that check, usually because two sentences had been joined. We dropped those.

A quote is one person's report. If someone writes that their bounce rate went from 4% to 10%, we present that as what they said and never as a market statistic.

We don't quote private details, abusive comments, or anyone on our own team.

How we spot vendor posts

Threads asking "what tool should I use" attract the people who sell those tools. In the threads we read for one guide, at least four replies came from founders or staff of monitoring tools, and some didn't disclose it.

A post or comment counts as a vendor post when it says "I built", "we built" or "my tool", links to the poster's own product, or comes from an account that only promotes one product. Vendor posts don't count towards "what Reddit thinks". If one is the only source for a fact, such as a price, we label it as the vendor's claim. Prices get checked on the vendor's own pricing page, with the date noted.

We sell a tool in some of the categories we write about. Those pages say so near the top, and HearBuyers sits in its own labelled box, never inside a list of what Reddit recommends.

Where our own numbers come from

Most guides lead with a number from our own scans of public posts, which no single thread can give you. The numbers come from two sources:

We counted requests for help across 19 service niches. Between 16 and 18 October 2026 we searched Reddit (12 months) and X (30 days) for the phrases buyers use when they ask for a service. Of the 1,875 posts we judged, 568 were real requests to hire or buy: 544 on Reddit and 24 on X. The full table is in where B2B buyers ask for help.
We also built subreddit profiles. On 17 and 18 October 2026 we read each community's rules and sampled 6,507 recent posts across 41 subreddits. About 5% of them read as someone looking to buy or hire, with a median of 6% per community. 27 of the 41 ban self-promotion or strictly limit it. Each community has its own profile page.

These numbers describe what our searches found in a fixed window. They don't cover all of Reddit or X. Our X window was shorter, so the lopsided Reddit split comes partly from how we collected the data. A model sorted posts into requests and non-requests, and before counting we removed any post that revealed sensitive personal details.

How often we re-check

Reddit is changing its rules for public data access between October 2026 and March 2027, and people edit or delete threads over time. So every guide shows the date we last checked it. Before each update we re-read the quoted threads, run the quote check again, and remove any quote whose comment is gone.

Our Reddit guides

Our longer studies are under research, and every guide is on the blog.

Tell us when we got something wrong

If a quote of yours appears here and you want it removed, or a fact on one of our pages is out of date, email us. We'll fix or remove it within 7 days.

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