How to Use the Reddit Profile Scraper

Before you start

• This Phantom is designed to help you assess the credibility and activity of Reddit users based on public profile signals.
• In practice, you can usually process around 100 Reddit profile URLs per launch, but the exact number may vary slightly depending on Reddit’s rate limiting.
• Best practices:
  • Start with a small batch of profile URLs to validate your results.
  • Account data reflects the state of the profile at the time of extraction and may change over time.
  • Some profiles may be private, deleted, or suspended, which can limit available data.
  • Use this Phantom after identifying active posters or commenters to avoid processing low-signal accounts.

Step 1: Choose which Reddit profiles to analyze

You can provide your Reddit profiles as follows:

• Use a single profile URL:
  • Paste the single Reddit profile URL.
• Use a spreadsheet with multiple profiles:
  • Provide a Google Sheet with Reddit profile URLs (make sure it’s shared with “Anyone with the link”).

  • Upload a CSV file with Reddit profile URLs (make sure it’s publicly accessible, and note that CSV upload is only available on paid plans).

    → If you’re using a spreadsheet, the Phantom defaults to the first column (A). To use a different column, enter the column’s header name in the field “Name of column containing profile URLs."

Step 2: Connect your Reddit account

To let the Phantom act on your behalf:

1. Install the PhantomBuster browser extension and connect your Reddit session in one click.
2. If you’re not using Chrome or Firefox, you can retrieve your session cookie manually (see our cookie guide).

Step 3: Configure how many profiles to process

Control how much data the Phantom processes during each run.

• Number of profiles to scrape per launch:
  • If you set a value, the Phantom will process up to that number of Reddit profile URLs.

  • If you leave this field empty, the Phantom will process profile URLs until it is stopped by Reddit rate limits.

    In practice, this usually results in around 100 profiles per launch, but the exact number may vary depending on Reddit’s behavior.

Result file settings (dropdown in setup)

• Name your results file (optional)

  • You can customize the file name.

    If you rename the file between launches, the Phantom will create a new results file and start processing inputs from scratch.

Step 4: Select launch frequency

Choose how often the Phantom should run:

1. Launch manually: Start the Phantom yourself whenever you need.
2. Launch once at a specific time: schedule a one-time run at a set date and time.
3. Launch repeatedly: schedule regular runs (e.g. once per day, several times during working hours).
4. Launch after another Phantom: chain automations together so this Phantom starts right after another finishes.
5. Advanced scheduling: customize the exact minutes, hours, days, or months when the Phantom should run.

→ For a complete walkthrough of scheduling options, see our guide to scheduling Phantoms automatically.

Step 5 (Optional): Advanced settings

Advanced settings are available if you want to fine-tune how your Phantom runs, but by default they’re already optimized for most use cases.

We recommend leaving them as they are unless a guide specifically instructs you to change something.

→ For a detailed overview of all advanced options (like execution limits, retries, email notifications, proxies, webhooks, and file management), see our Advanced settings guide.

Launch and results

When you’re ready:

1. Click Launch to start your Phantom.
   
2. Once it finishes, open the Results tab in the Phantom console to see the data collected.
   
3. Download your results as a CSV or JSON file, or reuse it as input for other Phantoms.
   → This Phantom is commonly used to filter signal from noise in Reddit datasets.

→ To learn how to export your data to Google Sheets, integrate with other tools, or reuse it in more automations, check our Access and Export your Phantom Results guide.

Export and input limits on the Free plan
If you’re on the Free plan or Free trial, some features are limited:
- CSV exports include only the first 10 rows of results.
- CSV download links (for dynamic viewing in Google Sheets or integrations) are not available.
- JSON exports are not available.
- CSV upload as an input method is not supported.
To unlock all features, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

What you give (Input) and What you get (Output)

This section gives you a detailed breakdown of everything you need to provide to run this Phantom, and everything you’ll receive once it completes.

What you give (Input)

What you get (Output)

Tips and troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Providing post or search URLs instead of profile URLs.
• Expecting all profiles to have the same level of available information.

If you run into issues

• Check how to troubleshoot your phantom using Logs.
• Browse the Fix Issues & Troubleshoot Errors section for solutions to common problems.
• Review our Automation Rate Limits by Platform guide.
• Check our Best Practices for Social Media Automation guide.

Suggested automations

After validating Reddit profiles, you can:

• Reddit Post Comments Export → Analyze discussions from high-credibility commenters only.
• Reddit Search Extractor → continuously discover new posts and authors to validate.
• Advanced AI Enricher → Filter users by account age, karma, or contribution level.