I tested 120 deleted Reddit posts across three archives. Only one actually returned the text.

If you've ever gone looking for a deleted Reddit post, you've probably been told the same thing: use PullPush, or the Wayback Machine, or one of the Reddit archive sites. Most guides list them side by side as if they're interchangeable.

They are not. I ran a measurement to find out what each one actually returns, and the gap between the three is much wider than the guides suggest.

What I measured

120 deleted threads, sampled from four subreddits in two time buckets.

• Communities, chosen to span different moderation styles: r/AskReddit (high-volume Q&A), r/buildapc and r/homelab (technical long-form), r/pics (image-first).
• Buckets: 15 threads posted on 2021-06-01, and 15 posted on 2024-06-01, per community.
• What counts as "recovered": the archive returned text longer than a bare [deleted] / [removed] placeholder, tied to the exact post ID.
• Data source: Arctic Shift's public API for finding the posts and reading their stored bodies; the Wayback CDX API for snapshot counts.

I did not store any post bodies. Only lengths and verdicts.

The result

Overall: 51 of 120 (42.5%).

Every single one of those 51 came from the same place. The other two sources contributed nothing.

Archive one: the one that worked

Arctic Shift is a community-maintained archive with a public search API. It returned the recovered body for all 51 threads.

Archive two: rate-limited out of the test entirely

PullPush — the one almost every guide names first — returned HTTP 429 for the entire test, with this body:

{"error":"Rate limit exceeded. This website does not provide free scraping
resources for agents. Please contact the administrator on Discord if you're
interested in a paid scraping service."}

Not a transient hiccup. It's the same response a browser user-agent gets, and other people have reported it independently. The service is still reachable manually through its own front-end, but as an API for automated lookups it returned nothing across the whole run.

Archive three: snapshots, but usually not the text

The Wayback Machine did better at existing than at containing the thing you want. Of 20 threads I sampled, 15 had at least one snapshot — 75%.

Then I fetched one of those snapshots and looked at it. The page loaded (550 KB of HTML), and the comment area was there. But where the post body should have been, the page contained [deleted]. The snapshot preserved the page, not the content.

That's still useful — you can confirm a thread existed, see its title, and pin down roughly when it was posted. It is not useful for reading what the post said.

Why the split falls where it does

The dividing line isn't the year. It's how fast the community removes posts.

The archive's read of a post happened a median of 0 days after the post was created — essentially immediately. So what determines whether the body survives is a race:

• In r/buildapc and r/homelab, a post that gets removed usually survives long enough for that first read. The body gets stored.
• In r/AskReddit, automod removes posts within minutes. By the time the archive reads the thread, there's nothing to store but [removed].
• In r/pics, the value is the image, and archives don't keep images. Even when the post record survives, there's often no text to recover.

This is also why "we merge multiple archives" doesn't help as much as it sounds. If the body was never captured by anyone, querying five archives returns five empty results.

What this means if you're building or using a recovery tool

1. "Use an archive" is not advice. Which archive matters enormously, and the one that gets recommended most was the one that returned nothing.
2. Coverage is a property of the community, not of the date. A 2021 buildapc post is far more likely to be recoverable than a 2024 AskReddit post. Any tool claiming a flat "we recover X% of deleted posts" is averaging over two very different populations.
3. Metadata is the reliable half. Title, author, subreddit, timestamp, score, and why it was removed survive far more often than the body. If you're building something for people who want to understand what happened in a thread, that's the durable signal.
4. Say "not found" when it's not found. A tool that fills the page with placeholders to look like it found something is worse than one that tells you the archive never had it.

The method, if you want to check my numbers

The probe is a single Python file, no dependencies beyond the standard library. It queries Arctic Shift's search endpoint by subreddit and date window, classifies each result by body length against the placeholder set, samples Wayback CDX for snapshot counts, and writes a JSON of verdicts and lengths — never the text.

Here is the whole classification rule, so you can reproduce the numbers without the script:

PLACEHOLDERS = {"[deleted]", "[removed]", ""}
MIN_REAL_BODY = max(len(p) for p in PLACEHOLDERS)  # 9

def classify(body):
    body = (body or "").strip()
    if len(body) > MIN_REAL_BODY:
        return "S"      # body recovered
    return "F"          # placeholder or empty

A result counts as recovered only if the returned text is longer than the longest placeholder and is tied to the exact post ID. Everything else is a miss — that's why the AskReddit columns read 0/15 rather than something softer.

Two caveats worth stating plainly:

• 120 threads is a small sample, chosen to compare community types rather than to estimate a sitewide rate. Treat the per-community numbers as directional.
• Conditions change. PullPush may lift its restriction. Arctic Shift may change its retention. The "November 2026" label on every number here matters — re-run the probe before quoting it later.

If you want the full probe script or the raw JSON of all 120 verdicts, drop a comment and I'll share it.

I maintain ViewDeletedReddit, which queries these archives together and shows which one supplied each result. The measurement above is the reason it reports "not found" rather than guessing — and the reason it names the source on every hit.