Verified against Perplexity Pro · 2026-07-30
Use Reddit focus mode to find what people actually experienced, not what a brand claims
A prompt for Perplexity's Reddit focus mode that specifically seeks out unfiltered, first-hand user experience — including complaints and failure cases — as a deliberate counterweight to a product or company's own marketing claims.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Use Reddit focus mode for this — I specifically want real user discussion and first-hand accounts, not marketing copy, review-site summaries, or official documentation restated in different words.
WHAT I'M TRYING TO LEARN
Whether this mattress actually stays cool through the night for hot sleepers, since that's the main reason we'd buy it
PRODUCT / TOPIC
The Cirrus Sleep hybrid mattress, medium-firm model
OFFICIAL CLAIM TO CHECK AGAINST (if any)
The product page claims it's '30% cooler than a standard memory foam mattress' based on their own lab testing.
WHAT COUNTS AS USEFUL HERE
- Prioritize threads and comments with specific, concrete detail — a named failure mode, a specific workaround someone found, an exact number or timeframe — over comments that just express general sentiment ("love it" or "hate it") with no detail behind it.
- Note roughly how much agreement or disagreement exists across different threads and different subreddits, not just what the single most upvoted comment says — a top comment can reflect one vocal user's experience rather than the median one.
- Distinguish an old, possibly outdated complaint (a bug or limitation from a version that may have since been fixed) from a recent one, and flag the date of the thread or comment for anything time-sensitive.
- If the official claim above conflicts with what real users are reporting, say so directly and describe the specific gap — what the claim says versus what people are actually experiencing — rather than smoothing the two into one blended narrative.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Flag anything that reads like undisclosed promotion (an account that only ever posts positively about this one product, unusually polished language for a casual forum post) rather than treating every comment as an equally trustworthy, ordinary user.
OUTPUT FORMAT
1. A short summary of the general sentiment, with a rough sense of how split or unified it is.
2. Specific, quoted or closely paraphrased examples for both the positive and negative experiences found, each with a note on how recent it is.
3. Where this diverges from the official claim, stated explicitly.
4. Anything you'd flag as likely inauthentic or promotional rather than genuine user experience.Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Reddit focus mode scopes retrieval specifically to Reddit's own discussion threads rather than the general web, which changes what's structurally available as a source in a way that matters here: a general web search on a product name is dominated by the brand's own pages, affiliate review sites optimized to rank well and convert clicks, and press coverage that's often just a rewritten press release, none of which are actually first-hand accounts even when they read like recommendations. Explicitly prioritizing specific, concrete detail over generic sentiment matters because Reddit threads contain a huge amount of low-information agreement or disagreement ('this is great,' 'this is trash') sitting right alongside genuinely useful specific accounts, and a summary that weighs both equally ends up diluted by the noise instead of anchored on the comments that actually carry information. Asking for a rough sense of agreement across threads rather than just the top comment corrects for how Reddit's own upvote mechanism works — the most upvoted comment in a thread reflects what resonated with that thread's specific audience at that specific moment, which is a different signal from what the balance of user experience actually looks like across many threads and communities, and treating one as a stand-in for the other systematically overweights whichever opinion happened to get there first or matched the loudest subreddit's priors. The promotional-content flag exists because forums are a known target for undisclosed marketing seeding, and a synthesis that treats every comment as equally genuine user experience will unknowingly launder planted positive content into what's presented as organic consensus — naming the specific signals that suggest inauthenticity (single-topic posting history, unusually polished phrasing) gives the model something concrete to check for instead of a vague instruction to 'be skeptical.'
Verified against
Perplexity Pro Reddit focus (2026) · 2026-07-30
Changelog
- 2026-07-30 — Initial publish, verified against Perplexity Pro Reddit focus mode.
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