The short version: Reddit has some of the best ChatGPT prompts on the internet, but you won’t find them by scrolling the top posts on r/ChatGPT, because the most upvoted ones are usually the most generic. You find the good ones by searching specific subreddits with Google, reading the comments instead of the post, and testing everything in a throwaway chat before it goes anywhere near client work.
Why Reddit is worth the effort in the first place
I’ll say this plainly: most “50 best ChatGPT prompts” listicles are written by someone who typed “chatgpt prompts for marketers” into ChatGPT itself, got a list back, and published it. Reddit is different because the prompts on there were written by people trying to solve a real problem, then argued with, corrected and rewritten by strangers in the comments who tried it and told them it was rubbish. That argument is the useful bit. You almost never get that on a blog.
I use Reddit for prompt-hunting most weeks now, partly for my own content and partly because clients ask me where I get my ideas from. The honest answer is a mix of subreddits, a Google search trick, and a lot of throwing prompts away.
The subreddits worth your time
Not all “ChatGPT” subreddits are equal. Here’s where I go:
- r/ChatGPT – the biggest one, over 9 million members. Mostly screenshots and jokes, but every so often someone posts a workflow prompt for something specific like rewriting a CV or building a content calendar, and it’s tested by thousands of replies within hours.
- r/PromptEngineering – smaller, more technical, full of people who care about structure (system prompts, role framing, chain-of-thought setups). Less business-friendly but the quality bar is higher.
- r/ChatGPTPromptGenius – built specifically for prompt sharing. Uneven, but searchable and tagged, which the bigger subs aren’t.
- r/smallbusiness and r/marketing – not prompt subs at all, but search either for “chatgpt” and you’ll find owners posting the exact prompt they used to write an ad, a job description or a pricing page, with real replies telling them what worked and what fell flat.
- r/freelance – useful if you’re a freelancer using ChatGPT for pitches, proposals or client emails, and worth pairing with a proper look at where to find genuine freelance writing work online so you’re not just prompting your way into low-paid gigs.
The search trick that matters
Reddit’s own search bar is bad. one of the worst search functions on any major website, and Reddit knows it, which is partly why so many people use Google instead. Here’s what to type into Google:
site:reddit.com "chatgpt prompt" [your specific task]
So for me it might be site:reddit.com "chatgpt prompt" LinkedIn content repurposing or site:reddit.com "chatgpt prompt" cold email follow up. This pulls threads from every subreddit at once, ranked by Google’s relevance rather than Reddit’s own upvote system, which tends to favour whatever’s newest and loudest rather than whatever’s best.
Add “before:2026” or a specific month to the search if you want to filter out prompts written for GPT-3.5 that don’t work the same way on current models. A lot of the highest-upvoted threads on r/ChatGPT are two or three years old now, and prompts written for an older, weaker model often need a rewrite to work on today’s version.
A real example from my own hunting
Back in the fourth week of January I was putting together content for a client in the events industry and needed a prompt for turning a 45-minute webinar transcript into five LinkedIn posts without it reading like a summary. I searched Reddit, found a post in r/ChatGPT with 2,400 upvotes offering exactly that, a neat five-step prompt asking ChatGPT to “identify the five most quotable moments and turn each into a standalone post.”
I ran it on the actual transcript. The output was flat. Every post started with “In this insightful segment…” which is the kind of phrase that tells you a human never wrote it and never checked it either. So I scrolled down to the comments, and there it was, a reply with only 40 upvotes from someone who’d clearly tried the original prompt and hit the same problem. Their fix was to add “write in the speaker’s actual tone and stop using the word insightful,” plus an instruction to pull direct quotes rather than paraphrase them.
That second version, the low-upvote comment reply, is the one I still use. The viral post got me in the door. The unglamorous reply did the actual work.
Step by step: my process for pulling a prompt off Reddit and testing it
- Write down the exact task first. Not “marketing prompts,” but “turning a client testimonial into three ad variations for Facebook.” Vague searches get you vague prompts.
- Search Google with the site:reddit.com trick, not Reddit’s own search bar.
- Sort mentally by recency, not upvotes. A three-year-old prompt built for an older model will often produce stiffer, more generic output on the current version.
- Read at least the top ten comments, not just the post. This is where corrections, tweaks and “this didn’t work for me until I added X” show up.
- Test it in a fresh, empty chat with no other context loaded, so you’re seeing the prompt’s real output, not something helped along by earlier conversation.
- Run it twice on two different real examples from your own business before deciding it’s good. One good result can be luck.
- Save the working version, not the original, into your own swipe file with a one-line note on what you changed and why.
That last step matters more than people think. I keep a simple document, nothing clever, just a running list of prompts that have earned their place after testing. If you’d rather start from a list someone else has already tested for you, I’ve put together a solid list of ready-to-use ChatGPT prompts and which ones to skip, which saves some of this legwork. There’s also a free download version if you want a free PDF of ChatGPT prompts for business, though I’d read that one first because not every “free” prompt list is worth handing over your email address for.
The uncomfortable bit nobody selling a prompt pack wants to tell you
Here’s the part most people writing about this topic quietly skip over: Reddit’s upvote system rewards prompts that sound impressive in a screenshot, not prompts that produce better output. A prompt that says “act as a world-class copywriter with 20 years of experience” gets upvoted because it’s fun to imagine, not because ChatGPT writes noticeably better copy when you tell it to pretend to be an expert. I’ve tested this directly, side by side, same task, with and without the “act as” framing, and the difference in output quality is small to nonexistent on current models. What moves the needle is specificity: real examples pasted in, a real audience described, a real constraint stated (“under 150 words,” “no exclamation marks,” “matches the tone of this paragraph”). Reddit is full of showy prompts and comparatively thin on prompts that just quietly work, so don’t assume upvotes mean quality. They mean entertainment, mostly.
The flip side of that same honesty: don’t go looking on Reddit for “jailbreak” prompts either, the ones promising to bypass ChatGPT’s guardrails. They circulate constantly on there, get patched within days, and using one on a business account is a good way to get flagged for nothing. I’ve written more on what ChatGPT jailbreak prompts are and why you should never bother with them if you’ve seen one floating round a thread and wondered whether it’s worth the risk. It isn’t.
Red flags to watch for in a Reddit prompt thread
- The post has huge upvotes but zero comments testing it. That usually means people upvoted the idea, not the result.
- The prompt is one long paragraph with no structure. The best Reddit prompts tend to be broken into numbered steps or clear sections, because that’s also how ChatGPT parses instructions most reliably.
- It promises a single prompt will “replace your marketing team” or similar. Nothing does that, and anyone claiming it hasn’t run a business.
- The account posting it has an oddly promotional history, ten posts, all linking to the same tool or course. Genuine Redditors posting a prompt that helped them rarely have a pattern like that.
Why this matters beyond just saving you time
There’s a bigger reason to get good at this. The prompts you use shape the outputs you publish, and increasingly, AI tools like ChatGPT are themselves a source people check before buying from you. If you want to understand how that visibility works, it’s worth reading about how to get your business cited by ChatGPT, because the quality of content you produce with these prompts eventually feeds back into what these tools say about you. And if you’ve ever asked ChatGPT about your own company and winced at the answer, that’s a separate but related problem worth sorting, covered in why ChatGPT might be telling people the wrong thing about your business.
A quick word on karma and credibility
One thing worth knowing before you take a Reddit prompt at face value: karma (Reddit’s point system for upvotes) is easy to farm and easy to fake with bot networks, especially on accounts under a year old. Before trusting a prompt from an account I don’t recognise, I check two things in about ten seconds, their post history (is it varied, or all promotional) and how old the account is. Not foolproof, but it filters out the obvious spam accounts posting the same “10x your productivity” prompt across fifteen subreddits in one afternoon, which happens more than you’d think.
Related reading: fun prompts to ask chatgpt.
More on ChatGPT prompts: the complete ChatGPT prompts guide groups all of these by problem.
Related reading: chat gpt portrait.
Related reading: how many prompts can you use in any conversation? 3 5 10 12.
Frequently asked questions
Is Reddit better than Google for finding ChatGPT prompts?
For finding prompts that have been tested by real people, yes, because Reddit’s comments show you what happened when someone else tried it, which a standalone blog post rarely does. For finding a polished, curated list quickly, a dedicated prompt list is faster since you’re not sifting through jokes and spam to get there.
Which subreddit has the best ChatGPT prompts?
r/ChatGPT has the biggest volume but the most noise. r/PromptEngineering has fewer posts but higher average quality for anyone comfortable with more technical language. r/ChatGPTPromptGenius is the most purpose-built for prompt sharing specifically.
Are Reddit ChatGPT prompts safe to use for a real business?
Most are, provided you test them on a real example before rolling them into client or customer-facing work, since they were written for whatever the original poster’s situation was, not necessarily yours. Avoid anything labelled a jailbreak prompt entirely, as those exist to bypass safety limits rather than improve output.
How do I search Reddit if the built-in search bar keeps giving me useless results?
Use Google instead with the search term site:reddit.com followed by “chatgpt prompt” and your specific task in quotes. It pulls results from every subreddit at once and ranks them by relevance rather than by Reddit’s own upvote-driven sorting.
