How to Get Reddit Keyword Alerts and Brand Mentions by Email

Ways to get an email when Reddit mentions you

1. Reddit's own tools: if you're there as a company, you can sign up for Reddit Pro, which is free. It has a Trends page: type in your brand name and it lists the posts and comments that mention it, and which communities they come from. But it's a page you have to remember to open; it won't email you. Reddit also gives you a feed for any search or community if you add .rss to the address. A feed reader can watch that, though Reddit slows you down if you read it too often. Old-style forums usually let you follow a thread or a board, not a word.
2. Free keyword bots: the easiest is F5Bot. You type in a few keywords, it watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters, and when a new post or comment mentions one of them you get an email within minutes. The free plan is enough for most people; paid plans start at $9.99 a month for 20 keywords. Talkwalker Alerts is also free and watches news, blogs, forums and X, either as it happens or bundled into a digest. Google Alerts works too if you set Sources to 'Discussions', but it only knows about pages Google has already indexed, so a thread reaches you hours or days later, and some never do.
3. Paid monitoring tools: Brand24, Mention and others put every source into one dashboard, with sentiment, reports and a Slack channel. Brand24's cheapest plan is $249 a month for 3 keywords, updated every 12 hours; hourly updates start at $349 and real time at $499. Mention gives you a price when you ask. They do a lot, but the price is meant for a marketing team, not for one person who just wants to know when their name comes up.
4. Something you set up yourself: hnrss.org gives you a feed of new Hacker News posts and comments that contain your keyword, and Reddit's .rss search does the same for Reddit. Then a feed reader, or a short script, turns them into email. It costs nothing but an evening. The catch is that the feeds get throttled, the script breaks when the site changes, and you're the only one who notices.

A Reddit keyword alert in one sentence

Write it the way you'd tell a colleague: 'email me when anyone on Reddit or Hacker News mentions Acme or acme.com', or 'when someone in r/smallbusiness asks which invoicing tool to use'. If you know which places to watch, say so; if not, that's fine. Add the words to watch and the things you don't want to see, like your own posts, job ads, or a company with the same name in another trade. A real person reads it and sets it up. No account, no app, and nothing for you to maintain afterwards.

We check the public pages of the places you named on a schedule: a Reddit search, a few communities, Hacker News, or a forum's new-posts page. We only write when there's a new mention. The letter is the mention itself: who wrote it, where, when, the sentence around your name, and the link, so one click takes you to the thread. Each mention is sent once; if someone quotes it later, it doesn't come again. The pace is yours: a letter as it happens, or one every morning with everything from the day before.

Some places we can't see: anything that needs a login, like Discord and Slack groups, Facebook groups or private communities, and sites that block visitors like us. If the place you named is one of those, the first letter tells you, and you pay nothing. The first 7 days are free with no payment details; after that it's $5/month for that one watch list, and it stops by itself if you don't subscribe. Reply once to stop.

Good to know about brand mention alerts

Being fast matters, but replying well matters more. A thread gets most of its readers right after it's posted, and a helpful answer left then keeps getting read by everyone who finds the thread on Google later. But most communities ban advertising, and an account that only shows up when its brand is mentioned gets removed, and remembered. So answer as someone who knows the subject, say who you are, and leave the threads that aren't about you alone.

Very common words will bury you. A product called Notion, Mention or Arc matches thousands of sentences a day. Add the category ('Arc browser'), your domain, a product name, or words to leave out, and expect to adjust it a few times in the first week. A person reading your sentence can do that for you; a bot can only do what its form allows.

No method catches everything. Google sees Reddit late, Reddit throttles feed readers, and no tool can see posts that were deleted, edited, or made in a private community. So if a mention matters enough to act on, open the thread and read all of it before you answer.

Try it — hand us this sentence:

Common questions