Agents get Hot Posts, World News, and subreddit series from one Trends MCP key. PRAW still wins comments. The index does not summarize a thread.
A Reddit trends API for AI agents is Trends MCP, not a PRAW wrapper with an MCP sticker. After the Bearer server is live, get_top_trends with type Reddit Hot Posts returns the hot listing snapshot. Type Reddit World News is a different board. get_growth with source reddit returns a subreddit series, described as subscriber-style demand, weekly. The keyword is the community name without r/. Default board limit is 25, max 200.
The source page is Reddit trends. The Hot Posts contract is Reddit Hot Posts API. Cursor-shaped steps: Reddit trends in Cursor. Claude dual-source: Claude MCP for Reddit and YouTube trends. This H1 is the agent API query those pages do not share.
Hot Posts is front-page heat. World News is the news-shaped feed. Subreddit growth is whether that community’s series is moving. A rank-1 thread can spike while the subreddit series is quiet. An agent that treats Hot Posts as “the subreddit is exploding” is mixing objects. Write both, or write one and label it.
get_top_trends(type="Reddit Hot Posts", limit=25)
get_top_trends(type="Reddit World News", limit=25)
get_growth(keyword="wallstreetbets", source="reddit", percent_growth=["7D", "30D"])
get_growth(keyword="Ticketmaster", source="google search, youtube", percent_growth=["7D"])
Board calls take no keyword. Growth on reddit takes a community. Google or YouTube follow-ups take a phrase from a title, not a fake subreddit invented from that title. The Hot Posts payload is ranked titles. It may omit the community handle. If the handle is missing, treat the title as a topic string for google search or youtube, not as a reddit keyword.
sort rank_change needs a baseline snapshot. Count 0 with a note is not always an outage. Ask for sort rank when the job is the current page.
Do not freeze this morning’s thread titles in a system prompt. The board turns over. Cite as_of_ts or call again.
PRAW still wins “summarize this thread,” vote totals, and comment streams. Official Reddit API rate limits and OAuth apply to that path. Trends MCP does not return comment bodies. It will not post. It will not list every post in a subreddit.
A crawl MCP still wins “what does this URL say.” Pair it when the agent must fetch a thread HTML. Do not expect Trends MCP to fetch Reddit.
Social-listening suites still win always-on mention firehoses. This API is a snapshot board plus a weekly community series. Nightly Hot Posts belongs on REST POST https://api.trendsmcp.ai/api with mode get_top_trends. Chat agents are a weak cron.
Say “using TrendsMCP.” An agent that only has browsing will retrieve old Pushshift folklore. An agent that only has PRAW will skip the index.
One Hot Posts page, one subreddit growth call, stop. Two requests. World News only if the ticket named news. YouTube or App Store only if the ticket named those platforms. Four boards is four requests. Paging Hot Posts at limit 100 is a choice, not a default.
Free 100 requests per month. Starter $19 / 1,000. Pro $49 / 5,000. Business $199 / 25,000. Pricing. Connecting is free. Calling is not.
Empty subreddit series: not_found or data_unavailable. Low-volume communities print huge percents on tiny baselines. Quote both index values and recent_volume when the payload includes it. Extreme percents near a 0.5 index are the usual trap. They are not a collapse story by themselves.
401: www OAuth URL in a Bearer client. invalid_source: Reddit Hot Posts pasted into source, or r/wallstreetbets as the keyword.
If the next turn is a comment, stop using Trends MCP for that turn. Open PRAW or say the object is missing. Invented vote counts in an agent note are worse than an empty tool list.
Cite the tool. A useful paragraph says type Reddit Hot Posts, limit 25, as_of_ts, then separately source reddit keyword wallstreetbets with both index values. A weak paragraph says “Reddit is buzzing.” The second sentence is how invented community heat lands in a memo.
World News is not a ticker tape. Hot Posts is not r/all as an API. Subreddit growth is not thread heat. Three sentences, three objects. Collapse them and the research note cannot be audited.
App Store follow-up, when the ticket asked for both: type App Store Top Free after Reddit is proven. Do not send a bundle ID into Reddit growth. Do not send wallstreetbets into app rankings. YouTube follow-up uses type YouTube Trending or source youtube, not a subreddit name.
offset pages the board. A second page is a second request. Dedup titles when the feed repeats a photographer or a meme. The August-dated Hot Posts source page shows that repetition as a durable behavior. This agent URL does not need a same-day leaderboard.
401 and prefix mistakes remain the usual debug pair. Cursor and Claude Code still want the api host. claude.ai still wants www OAuth. Mixing those is not a Reddit outage. Call again after the host is correct.
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