Brand monitoring for free: the stack that works

Brand monitoring means keeping track of where your company's name appears online, so you hear about praise, complaints, press coverage and mistakes before a customer points them out. For most small and mid-sized businesses a free stack covers it: Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts for the web, a keyword alert for Reddit, a saved X search, review notifications, and Search Console for how often people look you up.

Paid tools cost from $79 a month for a narrow app to $249 for a full listening tool billed monthly. Run the free stack for two months first. It will tell you whether you need one.

Write the query list before you touch a tool

Every tool below is only as good as the words you give it. Say you run Fennel, a made-up meal-kit company at fennelbox.com. Its list might be:

Three rules. Quotes around every name. A category word next to any name that is also an ordinary word. One alert per query, so you can see which ones earn their place and delete the rest.

Then build the same list for two or three competitors. A count of your own mentions means little until it sits next to theirs.

Google Alerts for brand mentions, set up properly

Google Alerts emails you "when new results for a topic show up in Google Search" (Google's help page). Most people type a name, press Create, receive very little and conclude it does not work. The settings are the difference.

1. Go to google.com/alerts and type the query exactly as written, quotes and minus signs included. An alert preview appears underneath and updates as you type, so you can check the operators do what you want before saving.
2. Click Show options.
3. How often: As-it-happens, At most once a day, or At most once a week. Daily suits your own brand; weekly suits competitors.
4. Sources: Automatic, or one of News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions and Finance. Leave it on Automatic unless one source floods you.
5. Language and Region: narrow them if you sell in one market.
6. How many: change "Only the best results" to All results. The default filters hard, and for a small brand you want everything.
7. Deliver to: your email, or RSS feed, which you can read in a feed reader or pipe into a team channel.

Once a month, check what it missed. Search Google for your name with the documented after: operator, for example "fennelbox" after:2026-09-01, and compare the results with what arrived by email (Google's search refinements). Each miss tells you which query to add.

There are no social networks in the source list, so treat Alerts as one net among several. If you have outgrown it, the Google Alerts alternatives page compares what replaces it.

Talkwalker Alerts as a second net

Talkwalker Alerts is free, from the listening company Hootsuite bought in 2024. It covers news, blogs, discussion forums and X, offers "As it happens" delivery among its frequencies, works in 22 languages, and delivers by email or RSS.

Run the same queries in both for a month. Keep whichever catches more of your real mentions, and keep both if each finds things the other misses.

Reddit needs its own alert

Reddit threads are where customers say what they would not write in a review, and the general alert tools are not built around them. F5Bot emails you when a keyword appears in a new Reddit post or comment. Its free plan is for personal use, with 5 keywords, and business use starts at $9.99 a month. Reddit's own free Reddit Pro adds a Trends dashboard for keywords.

Brand names that are ordinary words make Reddit especially noisy. The Reddit monitoring guide covers the filters that fix it and how to reply without being banned.

X: a saved advanced search

X's advanced search is available only when you are logged in. Fill in the exact phrase, the words to exclude, the accounts mentioned, a language and a date range, then bookmark the results page and open it once a week.

Save one search for your name and domain, and one for each main competitor. Posts that tag your handle already reach your notifications; the saved search catches the people who talk about you without tagging you.

Review sites

Turn on notifications wherever you have a business profile: Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, G2 or Capterra. A new one star review is the brand mention that most needs a fast reply. The review monitoring guide covers which sites matter and what to track over time.

Search Console: are more people looking for you?

Mentions are what other people say. Branded search is how many people went looking for you afterwards, and it is the closest thing to a free measure of brand demand.

Search Console's Performance report now has a branded queries filter that splits queries into Branded and Non-branded. Google classifies them with "an internal, AI-assisted system" that catches misspellings and product names. It only appears on top-level properties, not URL-path or subdomain properties, and only for sites with enough query volume.

If you do not see it, filter the Query dimension with a custom regex such as fennel|fenel.

Compare branded impressions month on month. A press feature that does not move branded search did less than it looked like it did.

The weekly routine

Log the mentions that matter in a sheet: date, source, link, what was said in your own words, and what you did about it. Flag any article that names you without linking to you, because those are the easiest links you will ever get; the unlinked brand mentions guide shows how to ask.

When paid listening is worth it

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026.

Pay when one of these is true:

• You cannot read everything. If mentions run to dozens a day, you need deduplication, filtering and summaries.
• You need Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. The free stack above does not reach them in any systematic way.
• You report on it. Sentiment trends, reach estimates and share of voice belong in a tool.
• Hours matter. A business with real crisis risk needs alerts on volume spikes, not a weekly check.

The difference between listening and monitoring matters when you buy, because vendors use both words loosely. The glossary entry on social listening vs social monitoring separates them.

Brand monitoring is not competitor monitoring

Brand monitoring watches what people say about a name. It will not tell you that a competitor launched eleven landing pages or started bidding on your brand in Google Ads, because nobody posts about that.

That second job is what Figo does. Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo checks each competitor once a week and reports their new ads, pages, pricing, rankings, Instagram and Facebook posts, Reddit threads that mention them, and their Google and Trustpilot reviews, from $49 a month for three competitors. It does not watch mentions of your own brand across the web and does not score sentiment, so for the job on this page, use the free stack above.