Track your brand, competitors, and category keywords across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, YouTube, podcasts, and the open web. Octolens filters the noise with AI and delivers the mentions that matter to Slack, email, webhooks, or your API. Not SEO rank tracking or uptime checks — mention monitoring.
No credit card • 2-min setup • 5k free mentions
What are you all using to keep track of mentions? Google Alerts catches maybe 10% of them
r/selfhosted · Reddit
Someone just recommended us in a thread with 40k views and we found out three days later…
@devfounder · X
Show HN comment thread comparing the top three options — pricing is the deciding factor
news.ycombinator.com · Hacker News
We switched tools last quarter and the onboarding was rough — anyone else run into this?
Growth Leaders group · LinkedIn
Episode 214 transcript: “the tool we ended up standardizing on for the whole team”
The Stack Podcast · Podcast
Trusted by brands people talk about online
Keyword monitoring is the practice of automatically tracking when specific words or phrases — a brand name, a competitor, a product category — appear online. The term covers three separate tool categories: mention monitoring, SEO rank tracking, and uptime keyword checks. Most people searching for it want the first one — and most tools only do one of the three.
| Mention monitoring | SEO rank tracking | Uptime keyword checks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it watches | New posts, threads, videos, and pages anywhere online that mention your keywords | Your website's position in Google results for chosen search terms | Whether a specific word still appears on a specific webpage you already know |
| What it tells you | What people say about your brand, competitors, or category — on social platforms and the open web | Whether your pages move up or down in search rankings over time | Page availability and content changes on your own site |
| Typical tools | Octolens | Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu | UptimeRobot, Pulsetic |
| Built for | Founders, marketing, DevRel, and support teams who need to hear and join conversations | SEO teams optimizing organic search performance | Ops teams verifying their own pages render correctly |
If you need rank tracking, Semrush or Ahrefs is the right category. If you need to verify your own pages render, UptimeRobot has you covered. This page — and Octolens — is about mention monitoring: hearing what real people say about your keywords, everywhere they say it.
"We were getting generic alerts without context. It told us someone mentioned Tally, but not what they said, where, or the sentiment."
Every day, people ask for recommendations, compare tools, and vent about problems your product solves — and almost none of them will ever tag you. Doing this without automation runs into four walls:
Searching each platform by hand takes 5–10 minutes, several times a day, per platform. Cover Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and Hacker News properly and keyword monitoring becomes someone's actual job — usually done badly, usually abandoned.
Google Alerts is email-only, digest-delayed, and blind to the platforms that matter: no Reddit threads, no X posts, no LinkedIn discussions, no podcasts. The conversations that drive B2B buying decisions never reach your inbox — see the Google Alerts alternatives comparison.
People recommend tools, complain about them, and compare them without ever @-mentioning the company. If you only watch notifications, the majority of what's said about your keywords is invisible to you.
A thread asking for recommendations is decided the same day. Teams that respond in minutes win the customer; teams that find the thread next week read about the competitor who got there first.
“Keyword monitoring by hand works fine until you're covering the ten segment subreddits you mapped out here at once, then it's a full time job just watching threads.”
“Keyword monitoring for pain point mentions is solid until your product spans a broad problem space, then the false positive rate on flagged nodes makes the 90 second reply cost closer to 10 minutes of triage per hit.”
“I have Google Alerts for many open source projects that I run, but in the past few years these alerts have become all but useless. Spammers scrape genuine pages … and put them into scammy '.it' domains.”
Enter your brand, competitors, and the category terms your buyers use. Octolens helps you tune each keyword — including the common-word names that break other tools.
Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, news, and the open web — one keyword list covers all of them simultaneously.
Set up your keywords once and Octolens watches all of these at the same time — or dive into how keyword monitoring works on the platform you care about most.
Reddit keyword monitoringPosts and comments across every subreddit — where buying decisions get debated.Twitter/X keyword monitoringReal-time keyword tracking for the fastest-moving conversations online.LinkedIn keyword monitoringPosts and comments where B2B buyers discuss tools in the open.
Bluesky keyword monitoringTrack keywords across the network where technical early adopters moved.
TikTok keyword monitoringFull video transcripts, not just captions — hear keywords spoken aloud.
GitHub keyword monitoringIssues, discussions, and READMEs that name your tool or your competitors'.Hacker News keyword monitoringThreads and comments where one mention can move your signup chart.
Stack Overflow keyword monitoringQuestions that mention your product — support signal at the source.
DEV.to keyword monitoringTutorials and posts where developers write up the tools they use.
YouTube keyword monitoringVideos and comments — reviews and tutorials mentioning your keywords.Podcast keyword monitoringTranscripts of shows where your category gets discussed out loud.
Newsletter keyword monitoringKeyword mentions inside the inboxes your buyers actually read.
News keyword monitoring150k+ outlets — coverage, funding news, and competitor announcements.
Web keyword monitoringForums, blogs, job posts, and review sites across the open web.The hardest part of keyword monitoring isn't finding matches — it's the flood of matches that have nothing to do with you. Brands like Prisma, Juicebox, and Tally share their names with everyday words. Without AI filtering, monitoring those keywords is unusable.
Before switching to Octolens, Prisma's team was "flooded with irrelevant noise — every mention of 'Prisma,' even things out of context." AI relevance scoring is what makes a common-word keyword monitorable at all.
Every mention is scored High, Medium, or Low relevance to your business. Alert only on high-relevance matches, or widen the net when you want the full picture — the noise never reaches your channel either way.
Each keyword mention is classified for sentiment and tagged automatically — buy intent, complaint, feature request, competitor comparison — so you can route alerts to the right team, not just one noisy channel.
Track your own name and misspellings, competitor names for switching conversations, and the pain-point phrases your product solves. Pro includes 10 keywords, Scale includes 40 — most teams cover all three types.
Keyword alerts land in Slack channels, email digests, or webhooks to any tool in your stack. Route competitor mentions to one channel, complaints to support, buy intent to sales.
Pull structured keyword mentions into your own workflows — one endpoint, JSON out, on every plan. Or give your AI agents direct access via our MCP server.
Set up your first keyword alert in 2 minutes
"Built on top of the Octolens API, I use Railway as a service to pipe all of the mentions to different channels. Then there's a cron job that does a daily digest for us."
"Wild AI-native onboarding experience. I literally entered zero input other than vercel.com to get my Octolens feed up and giving me mentions."
"A big part of our job is paying attention to what people are saying online - answering questions, correcting misunderstandings, and joining the conversation in real time."
"It's not about replying to everything. It's about showing up in the right conversations and doing it genuinely. Octolens helps us do that at scale."
"Developers tune out advertising, but they do talk online - and that's where our reputation is built."
$159/month
Billed annually
For growing brands
$499/month
Billed annually
For brands with communities
Custom
For viral brands
Need more mentions or keywords?
You can add extra mentions (from $0.01 per mention) and keywords (from $5/month) to any plan – with full cost control and flexibility.
Keyword monitoring is the practice of automatically tracking when specific words or phrases — a brand name, a competitor, a product category — appear online. You define the keywords once, and a monitoring tool continuously scans platforms like Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, YouTube, and the open web for new posts that match. Octolens adds an AI layer on top: every match is scored for relevance and sentiment, so you're only alerted on mentions that actually matter.
They're different product categories that share a name. SEO keyword tracking (also called rank tracking) watches where your website ranks in Google for chosen search terms — tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu do this. Keyword mention monitoring watches what people say about your keywords in posts, threads, videos, and articles across the internet. Octolens does mention monitoring. If you want rank tracking, an SEO suite is the right choice.
No. UptimeRobot's keyword monitoring checks whether a specific word appears (or stops appearing) on a webpage you already know — useful for verifying your own site renders correctly. Octolens solves the opposite problem: discovering new posts and pages you don't know about yet, anywhere online, that mention your keywords.
Three types cover most teams. Brand keywords: your company and product names plus common misspellings. Competitor keywords: rival product names, which surface switching conversations and comparison threads. Category keywords: the pain points and product category terms your buyers use before they know you exist — phrases like "alternative to X" or "best tool for Y". Pro includes 10 keywords and Scale includes 40, enough to run all three types side by side.
Yes. Google Alerts is where most people start with keyword monitoring, and its gaps are why they leave: it's email-only, arrives in delayed digests, has no filtering, and doesn't cover Reddit, X, LinkedIn, podcasts, or most forums. Octolens monitors 15+ platforms including all of those, refreshes hourly or in real time, filters with AI, and delivers to Slack, webhooks, API, and MCP. See the full Google Alerts alternatives comparison for how the options stack up.
Google Alerts is free and covers a slice of Google's index. F5Bot is free and monitors Reddit and Hacker News. Both are reasonable starting points for a side project. Teams tend to outgrow them for the same reasons: no relevance filtering, no sentiment, limited platform coverage, and no way to pipe mentions into Slack or an API. Octolens offers a free 7-day trial to test the difference on your own keywords.
Yes — Reddit is one of the highest-signal platforms for keyword monitoring, covering both posts and comments across every subreddit. See the dedicated Reddit keyword monitoring page for how tracking works there, including subreddit-level context and comment coverage.
Yes. Octolens tracks keyword mentions in posts on X in real time on the Scale plan and hourly on Pro — without you needing API access of your own. It's usually the fastest-moving source: threads with buying questions are often decided within hours. More on the Twitter/X monitoring page.
Yes, and this is where most keyword monitoring tools go blind: spoken content. Octolens monitors YouTube videos and comments, and transcribes podcasts, so a host recommending your product — or a reviewer criticizing it — shows up in your feed like any other mention.
Every match is scored for relevance to your business before it reaches you. That's what makes common-word brand names — think Prisma, Juicebox, or Tally — monitorable at all: mentions of prisms, juice, or vote tallies get scored low and filtered out, while posts about the actual products get flagged high. You choose whether to be alerted on high-relevance matches only or include medium-relevance for a broader view.
Hourly on the Pro plan and in real time on Scale. Either way, you're finding conversations while they're still alive — not in next week's digest.
Yes, on every plan. Octolens provides a REST API, webhooks, and an MCP server — one endpoint with structured JSON covering all 15+ platforms. Teams pipe keyword mentions into CRMs, Linear, custom dashboards, and AI agent workflows. You can also export to CSV.
Octolens offers a free 7-day trial. After the trial, pricing starts at $159/month (billed annually, or $199/month billed monthly), which includes 10 keywords, 15,000 mentions per month, all 15+ platform sources, AI filtering, and API, webhook, and MCP access.
Please contact us at hi@octolens.com and we will be happy to help you.
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