A lot of people come looking for a "Reddit search API" because they want to track mentions of something automatically: a brand, a product, a stock ticker, a competitor. They want to wire it into their own tools instead of reading emails. F5Bot has an API that does exactly that, and it has quietly become the engine behind a good chunk of the market.
F5Bot is a service that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites for the keywords you pick. The API lets you manage those keywords in code and get each match delivered to your own systems the moment it happens.
If you have already tried building on Reddit's own search, you know the problem. Reddit's search is bad. It misses most mentions, it is especially blind to comments, and comments are where most of the conversation lives. You can query it all day and still never see the thread where someone named your product.
The resellers built on top of it inherit the same blind spot. Services like Apify and Data365 wrap Reddit's search and sell it back to you, so you pay more for the same weak coverage. They also make you poll. You hit them over and over for each subreddit or each search term, which means you are always a step behind, you get nothing in real time, and the bill climbs with every request. They cost more and move slower, and at the end of it you are still only seeing what Reddit's search decides to surface.
F5Bot reads new posts and comments as they come in and matches your keywords against them itself. It does not lean on Reddit's search to decide what counts, so it catches the mentions that search quietly drops. And because it is watching the firehose rather than polling a query, it can hand you a match seconds after it is posted.
We see every single post and comment on Reddit, so nothing slips past for lack of looking. And since the matching happens on our end, we can handle any search volume you throw at it. Whether you are watching one keyword or thousands, the coverage is the same.
That difference is the whole reason F5Bot exists, and it is why, as of 2026, F5Bot is powering several of its own competitors' products behind the scenes. When a monitoring tool needs coverage that actually works, this is often what is running underneath.
The API is straightforward and does what you would expect:
For results, you point F5Bot at a webhook. Every time one of your keywords matches, F5Bot sends an HTTP POST to your URL with the match details in JSON, so your systems hear about it right away instead of waiting on an inbox. There is a JSON feed too if you would rather pull. The full details, including the endpoints, the payload format, and the webhook retry behavior, are in the API documentation.
The API tends to attract people building automation on top of it. A common one is financial monitoring, where a stock ticker or a company name gets wired straight into an internal tool or a dashboard. It is a natural fit, since a mention showing up in real time is a lot more useful than one you find a day later. F5Bot also counts at least one major hedge fund among its users.
If you are automating anything that depends on hearing about a Reddit mention quickly and reliably, the API is built for that kind of work.
The pricing is the other half of the story. The polling services charge you per request and add up fast, especially once you are watching more than a handful of terms. F5Bot's API comes in far cheaper for far better coverage. It is available on the upgraded tiers, and you can see what is included on the pricing page.
Make an account, upgrade to a tier with API access, and generate a token from your API dashboard. From there you can add your first keyword and point a webhook at your own tools in a few minutes. The API documentation has working examples to copy from.