The Scenario
You are a media buyer managing a Reddit Ads account for an outdoor gear brand. You have ten seed subreddits in column A of a Google Sheet: communities you already know perform well for the brand. The campaign is doing well and leadership wants to expand reach without losing relevance.
Manual research will take most of the day. The brief asks for fifty similar communities by Thursday.
The bad version:
- You open Reddit.com and browse each seed subreddit to find related communities in the sidebar
- You try to figure out which of the "similar subreddits" are actually targetable in Reddit Ads
- You copy names and subscriber counts into the sheet by hand
- After four seed subreddits you have lost track of which suggestions came from which seed
- You have thirty-one communities in the sheet and no record of which ones came from the expansion versus the original seeds.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the seed subreddit column and calls the Reddit Ads community suggestions API for each seed in one pass, so you never manually browse Reddit to expand a targeting list.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For the subreddit names in column A of my sheet, fetch community suggestions from the Reddit Ads API and write suggested subreddit name, subscriber count, and relevance into columns B, C, and D. Use one block of rows per seed subreddit, labeled with the seed name.
SheetXAI calls the Reddit Ads community suggestions endpoint for each of the ten seed subreddits and writes the results into the sheet. Ten seeds, up to fifty suggested communities, with the seed label retained so you know where each suggestion came from.
What You Get
A structured expansion table in the sheet:
- Seed label row — the original subreddit from column A
- Up to 5 suggestion rows per seed — suggested subreddit name in column B, subscriber count in column C, relevance score in column D
- Repeated for all 10 seeds — one labeled block per seed
The source of each suggestion is traceable. You know r/trailrunning was suggested because of r/ultrarunning, not because of r/fitness. That matters when you are presenting the targeting rationale to a client.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Targeting expansion scenarios have consistent edge cases. SheetXAI handles them inline.
When some seeds return fewer than 3 suggestions
Niche subreddits sometimes have few community suggestion results. You want those noted rather than leaving a silent gap.
For each seed subreddit in column A, fetch community suggestions from the Reddit Ads API. Write the results into columns B, C, and D. If fewer than 3 suggestions are returned for a seed, write "FEW SUGGESTIONS" into column B for that seed's row after the last result.
When you need to deduplicate suggestions across seeds
A community like r/running might appear as a suggestion for multiple seeds. You want each subreddit in the final list once.
For each subreddit in column A, fetch the top 5 community suggestions from the Reddit Ads API. Write results into a flat table: seed subreddit in column A, suggested subreddit in column B, subscriber count in column C. Remove any duplicate suggested subreddits across all seeds. After deduplication, write the final count of unique suggestions into cell E1.
When you need to filter suggestions by minimum subscriber count
You only want communities with at least 25,000 subscribers to ensure enough scale.
For each seed subreddit in column A, fetch community suggestions from the Reddit Ads API. Write only suggestions with more than 25,000 subscribers into columns B, C, and D. Label each block with the seed name. Note suggestions that fell below the threshold in column E.
When you need to combine the expanded list with performance data to prioritize the suggestions
You want to know not just what communities Reddit suggests but also which ones have the best CPC history in your account.
For each seed subreddit in column A, fetch the top 5 Reddit Ads community suggestions and write suggested subreddit name into column B and subscriber count into column C. Then fetch the last 30 days of ad group performance from my Reddit Ads account. For any suggested subreddit that already appears in my ad group targeting history, write the historical CPC into column D. Leave column D blank for suggestions with no history.
The pattern: the seeds are in the sheet. The expansion is an API call per seed. SheetXAI does all ten calls and writes a structured result set you can use immediately.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with seed subreddits, then ask it to expand the targeting list with Reddit's community suggestions. The Reddit Ads integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to discover communities from keywords or the Reddit Ads in Google Sheets overview.