What a Reddit Buying Question Actually Looks Like: I Read All 148 Highest-Intent Threads

I've pulled from our scan data before to work out where the buying questions live on Reddit: small threads, not popular ones. The question people kept sending me afterward was the practical one. Fine, so the good threads don't announce themselves. When one is in front of me, how do I know it's a buyer and not just someone talking?

So I did the unglamorous thing and read them. Not one month this time, everything: every thread our scanner has scored 60 or above for buying intent, 148 of them across 50 subreddits, going back roughly three months. (The earlier post looked at 147 raw candidates in a single month; this is the stricter cut, only the ones that cleared the high-intent bar, across the whole history.) I read them one at a time and wrote down what the person was actually saying. I run CueScout, which reads Reddit continuously and scores threads for intent, so the model already ranked these. I wanted to see the language behind the number.

Some of it was exactly what I hoped. A lot of it was junk that had fooled the score, which I'll get to, because leaving that part out would make this post a lie.

The buying question has a shape

Real buyers ask a specific, answerable question. Not "is cold email dead" (a debate), but "which tool can I use to send cold emails" (a decision). Reading the 148, the same phrasings kept coming up:

• "Best…" — "Choosing the best screen recorder for Mac", "best email finder tool for cold email sending, here's my shortlist", "best tools for Reddit lead generation right now".
• "Which…" — "which AI tool should I buy for work, need honest suggestions", "which is the best tool for cold emailing".
• "Recommend / recs…" — "starting email marketing for the first time, need tool recs".

24 of the 148 used one of those shopping words outright. That's the surface tell you can almost search for.

The sharpest signal, though, is narrower than any keyword: when the person names the specific tool they're trying to leave. "Best alternative to Apollo." "Open source alternative to Loom." "Need an alternative to Go High Level CRM." "Outgrowing GoHighLevel, what should I migrate to?" Only a handful did this, so I won't pretend it's common. But someone who can name what they're replacing has already decided to replace it; they're just choosing the destination. That's about as close to a raised hand as Reddit produces, and those GoHighLevel and Apollo threads had single-digit upvotes. Nobody churning off your competitor writes a viral post about it.

The other tell is a complaint

The second pattern surprised me because it doesn't look like buying at all. It looks like venting. A big chunk of the high-intent threads were people frustrated with a tool or a situation they're already in:

• "All of the screen recording and screenshot tools on macOS have stopped working. I'm not sure why."
• "macOS Tahoe: screen recording makes my M2 and M3 MacBook Air unusable, anyone else?"
• "Paid CAC is getting painful… what organic is actually working for you right now?"
• "GHL cold email deliverability issues, looking for advice."
• "Anyone else tired of shady 'SEO companies for small businesses' that take your money and vanish?"

None of these ask "recommend me a tool." They're complaints. But a complaint about a specific tool, cost, or vendor is a person actively unhappy with the status quo, which is the moment right before they go looking for a replacement. If you only chase threads that literally ask what to buy, you miss the ones where the decision is still forming inside a bad mood. The model scored these high and, reading them, I agreed. Being the useful reply in a frustration thread is worth more than being the tenth "have you tried X" in an obvious shopping thread.

The part I'd rather skip

Here's the uncomfortable half, and it's in because a post that pretends a scan is 100% clean is exactly the kind of post I don't trust when other people write it.

At least 20 of the 148 "high intent" threads were not buyers. They scored high because they're shaped like demand while being something else, and worse, the raw count is padded by reposts:

• A lead-gen ad, "that's how I generate dozens of leads for my clients [copy this very simple method]", appears across four subreddits, near-verbatim. Its sibling, "This Is How I Used to Generate Leads vs How I Generate Leads in the AI Era", shows up twice more.
• A validation post, "would you use a tool that alerts you when someone is looking for exactly what you sell on Reddit", appears three times across different subreddits. It reads like a buyer describing a need. It's a founder market-testing an idea.
• "Any suggestions for agents to partner with a small startup team" was posted three times in one day across r/ClaudeAI, r/AI_Agents, and r/hermesagent.
• Straight self-promo: "built a Reddit marketing tool, looking for early testers", "building Reddit marketing tools? self promote!", "I proved my tool works by getting 50k views on Reddit".
• Ragebait with a fake citation: "REPORT: Cornell researchers prove that a single Reddit comment can poison AI search engines". And one thread whose entire title is the word "Yes."

So two things are true at once. The honest hit rate is lower than the score implies, and the count itself is inflated, because one determined spammer reposting the same ad six times looks like six buyers to a naive tally. A 60+ intent score means "worth a human looking," not "this is a customer." That gap is the whole reason I keep saying the reading can be automated but the judgment can't. If I'd fired an automated reply at all 148, I'd have pitched a product to a market-research post, a stack of copy-paste spam, and a piece of ragebait, which is a great way to get shadowbanned, which I have in fact done.

The bit that's a little on the nose

One more pattern I can't unsee: several of the highest-intent threads were people looking for a tool like the one I sell. "Is there an AI tool that finds leads on Reddit and writes personalized replies." "What Reddit monitoring tools are you actually using in 2025?" "Best tools for Reddit lead generation right now." I'm not going to pretend that isn't convenient for me. But it's the useful part of the finding too: if you want to know whether there's demand for what you're building, the highest-intent threads in your own category are sitting on Reddit describing your product back to you in their own words. That's a spec written by the market, for free.

What this doesn't say

Same honesty as the earlier posts, plus a couple specific to this pull.

It's 148 threads over about three months, from 8 products. Reading the list, the intent clusters hard around whatever those products do, and for this set that turned out to be a surprising amount of local-service-business SEO (plumbers, roofers, clinics asking about Google Business Profiles and "missed call" follow-up) alongside the SaaS, cold-email, and Mac-tool threads I expected. A different set of products would light up a completely different 148. So read the shapes (shopping question, competitor name, frustration) as the portable part, not the exact subreddits or phrasings.

The scores are the model's, and the "at least 20 were junk" count is mine, from reading. Someone stricter would flag more; someone looser, fewer. And I paraphrased some titles instead of quoting them exactly, on purpose, so I'm not sending a blog's worth of traffic at individual posters who asked a normal question.

What I'd do with this

Search for the shape, then read. "Best [your category]", "alternative to [your competitor]", and your competitors' actual product names are the cheapest queries you can run on Reddit, and they surface both the shoppers and the switchers. But the frustration threads, where the decision is still forming, won't match a tidy keyword, which is the actual reason I built scoring on top of raw keyword alerts. If you're running a keyword-alert tool and only catching the literal "recommend me a tool" posts, that gap is the thing, and I wrote it up in the Notifier alternative comparison.

Read before you reply, every time. A score narrows 148 candidates down; it doesn't tell you which twenty are decoys and reposts. That's a two-minute human read, and skipping it is how the automated-reply crowd ends up shadowbanned.

And if you want to know whether the AI answer engines already name you when someone types one of these "best tool for X" questions (increasingly where the shopping starts, before Reddit), the free AI visibility checker tells you in about a minute, no signup. The fuller by-hand method is in how to find buying intent on Reddit.

I'll keep pulling these. If there's a cut you want, the exact keyword frequencies, how the junk rate changes by subreddit, tell me and I'll dig it out of the next batch.