How to monitor Reddit for brand mentions

The endpoint

Make the call

Put your key in FASTFETCHZ_KEY. The target below is a real one — it works as written.

curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/reddit/search?target=notion" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"

What comes back

Trimmed to the fields that matter. The full payload carries more.

{
  "success": true,
  "service": { "platform": "Reddit", "name": "Search" },
  "credits_charged": 1,
  "data": {
    "posts": [
      {
        "id": "1f8xq2p",
        "title": "Switched our whole team from Notion to something else — here's what broke",
        "subreddit": "productivity",
        "author": "throwaway_pm_2026",
        "created_utc": 1782115200,
        "score": 412,
        "upvote_ratio": 0.91,
        "num_comments": 187,
        "over_18": false,
        "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1f8xq2p/",
        "selftext": "We ran Notion for three years across 40 people..."
      }
    ]
  },
  "cursor": "t3_1f8xq2p"
}

Getting more than one page

Both endpoints page with a token — Reddit calls it an after value and it comes back as cursor. Send it on the next call to continue. An empty or missing cursor means you have reached the end of what Reddit will serve for that query.

For monitoring, one page is usually the whole job. Sort by new, pull page one on your schedule, and stop as soon as you hit a post ID you have already stored. Only walk deeper when you are doing a first-time backfill of everything historically said about you.

# Page 1 — newest mentions across all of Reddit
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/reddit/search?target=notion&sort=new" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"
# -> { "data": { "posts": [ ... ] }, "cursor": "t3_1f8xq2p" }

# Page 2
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/reddit/search?target=notion&sort=new&cursor=t3_1f8xq2p" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"

What it costs

Which endpoint, and when

Use search when you do not know where the conversation will happen — a brand name, a product name, a competitor, a misspelling of your brand that people actually type. It reads all of Reddit, so it catches the post in r/smallbusiness you would never have thought to watch.

Use subreddit posts when the community is the target: your own subreddit, the two industry subreddits your buyers live in, the support subreddit where complaints land. It returns 18 newest posts per call and is the cheapest way to stay current on a place that matters. Search misses posts that mention you only in the comments; watching the community catches those threads because you see every post.

curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/reddit/subreddit-posts?subreddit=Fitness&sort=new" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"
# -> 18 newest posts + an after cursor

The subreddit parameter trips everyone up

subreddit takes the bare name and it is case-sensitive. Fitness works. fitness does not. r/Fitness does not. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/ does not. This is the single most common first failure against this endpoint, and it fails cleanly rather than silently — you get an error, not an empty list, and a failed call is never charged.

Get the casing from the subreddit's own page header and store it exactly as written, because there is no forgiving lookup. Normalising to lowercase in your own code is the bug that breaks a monitoring job three weeks after you shipped it.

Be realistic about full historical coverage

Reddit's search does not hand you everything ever written about you. It is depth-limited per query, so a brand with years of mentions cannot be fully backfilled from one search term. The way around it is more queries, not more pages: search your brand, your product names, your domain, your founders' handles, and your common misspellings, each as its own run.

Ongoing monitoring is cheap. Five search terms plus four watched subreddits, hourly, is 9 calls an hour — roughly 6,500 calls a month. The 10,000-post figure above is a one-off backfill, not what monitoring costs to run.

What you cannot get

Private, quarantined and banned subreddits return nothing. Deleted and removed posts are gone — if you did not capture it, you cannot recover it, which is the real argument for storing every result rather than re-querying.

You do not get sentiment, and we do not invent it. The payload gives you title, body, score, upvote ratio and comment count; scoring tone is an LLM pass you run on the text yourself. You also do not get the comments in a search result — that is a separate call per thread, and on a 187-comment post it is worth it only for the threads that matter.

Endpoints you will probably want next