The Hacker News monitoring toolfor brands people talk about

Hacker News monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, products, competitors, or industry keywords across HN posts and comments. Without it, you miss critical conversations: an Ask HN thread recommending alternatives to your product, technical criticism gathering upvotes unanswered, or a front-page thread about your category. HN has no notifications and no tagging — threads about your product appear and peak within hours, and nobody tells you they existed.

Hacker News monitoring is tactical and focuses specifically on HN as a platform, tracking specific keywords, brand mentions, and competitor names with alerts for immediate action. Social listening is strategic and monitors conversations across multiple platforms including Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and others, analyzing broader trends, sentiment, and themes by aggregating data over time for insights.

HN is where technical buyers do due diligence in public. Monitoring it lets you answer questions in live threads, correct inaccurate claims before they become the top comment, spot users asking for alternatives to your competitors, and collect brutally honest product feedback. For developer tools especially, a single well-handled HN thread can drive a visible spike in signups.

We check Hacker News for new posts every hour on the Pro plan. On the Scale plan, mentions arrive in real time. If you have specific requirements, contact us at hi@octolens.com.

Yes, you can monitor Hacker News with Octolens without having an HN account because our monitoring works independently of any personal account.

Setting up a Hacker News keyword alert with Octolens takes under 5 minutes. Sign up for a free trial, add the keywords you want to track (your brand name, competitor names, industry terms, or pain points), and choose where you want alerts delivered — Slack, email, webhooks, or pull them via API. Octolens will scan HN continuously and alert you every time your keyword appears in a post or comment.

Google Alerts only tracks web pages indexed by Google — HN threads surface late or not at all, and comments are effectively invisible to it. Hacker News keyword alerts from Octolens track posts and comments as they appear, so you can join a thread while it's still live instead of finding it days later. Octolens also adds AI relevance scoring so you only see mentions that actually matter to your business.

Yes! You can set up Hacker News keyword alerts for multiple keywords at once. Track your brand name, competitor names, industry terms, pain points, or any phrase relevant to your business. Each keyword is monitored independently, and you can configure different alert settings for each one.

You can monitor public HN posts and the comments under them. This includes regular stories, Show HN launches, Ask HN questions, and job threads containing your keywords.

Yes. Any post that matches your keywords is collected as it appears, so a story about your product surfaces in your feed and alerts immediately — while there's still time to join the discussion.

Yes! You can customize your notifications based on AI relevance scores (high, medium, low) and receive them via email, Slack, or webhook.

Yes. The same keywords can monitor Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow, DEV.to, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and more — 15+ platforms in one feed, so an HN thread and the Reddit crosspost about it show up side by side.

Yes, you can export your Hacker News monitoring data as CSV. We also provide webhook, API, and MCP server integrations for connecting with your existing tools — included on every plan.

HN threads move fast and most listening tools don't cover Hacker News at all. Octolens monitors posts and comments, uses AI-powered relevance scoring to separate real conversations from passing mentions, and delivers them to Slack, email, webhooks, API, or MCP. It's built for brands people talk about online.

Octolens offers a free trial for Hacker News monitoring. After the trial, the pricing starts at $159/month (billed annually, or $199/month billed monthly).

Please contact us at hi@octolens.com and we will be happy to help you.