How noisy are Reddit keyword alerts? A one-week test

On 1 November 2026 we picked 10 keywords a B2B seller might track and paired each with the category that seller sells in. For each keyword we pulled up to 25 Reddit posts from the past week that contained it, sorted by relevance, plus up to 15 comments from the same week. That's roughly what a basic keyword alert would send.

A model then scored every match from 0 to 100 for buying intent, using the same rubric as our free buying intent scorer. A score of 90 or above means someone is asking for a recommendation with urgency or budget. 70 to 89 means they are comparing options or describing a problem they need solved now. Under 40 covers job posts, students, vendors, jokes and general chat. The model also flagged posts written by someone promoting their own product. We stored only links and scores, no post text.

Of the 264 matches, 211 were posts and 53 were comments. The median score across all matches was 10. By score band, 202 matches scored under 40, 21 scored 40 to 69, 19 scored 70 to 89 and 22 scored 90 or more.

• About five non-buyers for every buyer. If you read every match a keyword alert sends, you go through roughly five posts from non-buyers for each one from a buyer.
• Some keywords are mostly sellers. For "social media scheduler" and "web designer", most matches were people advertising that same thing. Pairing these keywords with buyer phrases such as "looking for", "recommend" or "need a" might help, but we didn't test that here.
• Software keywords had the best shares, though not all of them. "crm", "project management tool" and "payroll" had the highest shares of buyers. "help desk" had none this week.

This covers one week of Reddit only, 10 keywords, and a capped sample per keyword. A model did the scoring, so treat the shares as estimates rather than exact rates. Reddit search picks its own set of matches, and Reddit's rules for public data access are changing between October 2026 and March 2027. We keep the raw scores and links with our research files, so ask us if you want them for your own analysis.

"HearBuyers, How noisy are Reddit keyword alerts? A one-week test, 1 November 2026, hearbuyers.com/research/reddit-keyword-alert-noise." Our general approach is described in how we research Reddit, and the monitoring tools people on Reddit use are covered in Reddit monitoring tools Redditors use.