How Reddit Profile Search Works

You give it a username; it gives you back everything Reddit already publishes about that account, on one page. Nothing here is unlocked, scraped from behind a login, or bought. Every field below comes from a public source you could read yourself, and the second list is the part no tool can reach, including this one.

What happens when you search

1. 1

   You enter a username

   A username, a u/ handle or a full reddit.com/user/ link all work. The prefix is stripped and the name is checked against Reddit before anything else runs.

2. 2

   Reddit's public endpoints are read

   The account's about, submitted and comments data is fetched across several sort orders, because any single sort stops at roughly 1,000 items.

3. 3

   The gaps are filled from other public sources

   Reddit's own author search, a public archive and the web index are checked for posts and comments the listings no longer return.

4. 4

   Results are merged and shown

   Duplicates are removed, the karma breakdown and account age are attached, and everything is laid out on one page you can share by link.

Where each field comes from

Karma broken into post, comment, awardee and awarder totals

Reddit about.json

Account creation date, verified status, Reddit Gold status, follower count

Reddit about.json

Public posts and public comments, read across multiple sort orders

submitted.json and comments.json, deep-fetched

Posts found through Reddit's own search by author

search.json with an author: filter

Archived posts and comments that Reddit's live listings no longer return

Arctic Shift public archive

Threads located through the web index, then parsed for that user's comments

Brave Search API

The subreddits an account posts in most often

Derived by frequency, top 20

What no tool can retrieve

These are not features held back for a paid plan. Reddit does not make them public, so nobody can return them, and a tool that says otherwise is describing something it cannot do.

Private messages or chats

Never exposed by any Reddit API

Upvote and downvote history

Made private by Reddit in 2017

Email address, real name, IP address or location

Not public profile data

Saved posts, hidden posts, or subreddit subscriptions

Account owner only

Content in private or quarantined subreddits

Not publicly readable

Anything from a suspended or shadowbanned account

Profile lookup returns nothing

Content deleted before a public archive captured it

Nothing left to fetch

Why a profile can look empty is covered in can Reddit profiles be private, and what survives deletion in deleted Reddit comments.