Pushshift is a third-party service that archived and indexed Reddit posts and comments at massive scale, powering historical search, deleted-content lookup, and most academic research on Reddit.
Why it matters
For years Pushshift was the de facto research backbone of Reddit: it let anyone query the full history of a subreddit, including removed and deleted content, far beyond what Reddit's native search allows. After the 2023 Reddit API pricing changes, Reddit cut Pushshift's open access and restricted it to approved moderators. The episode matters to founders for two reasons: it shows how tightly Reddit now controls its data (the same data later licensed to Google and OpenAI for AI answers), and it explains why deep historical Reddit research is harder than it used to be, you can no longer just query a decade of threads for free.
How to use it
- Don't build workflows that depend on Pushshift access; it's mod-only now, and unofficial mirrors are unreliable and against Reddit's terms.
- For competitive and audience research, use Reddit's native search plus Google
site:reddit.comqueries, good enough to surface the evergreen threads that matter for your niche. - For ongoing monitoring, track new threads as they appear via social listening rather than mining archives retroactively.
Related terms
Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.
