Reddit monitoring: free and paid ways to track mentions

Reddit monitoring means getting told when your brand, a competitor or a phrase from your category appears in a new Reddit post or comment, so you can read the thread while it is still active. For most businesses the free stack is enough: Reddit's own search for what already exists, Google for what Reddit search buries, and a keyword alert for everything new.

The hard part is not finding mentions. It is throwing away the ones that are not about you.

Decide what you are listening for

Most people set one alert for their brand name and stop. Three lists work better. Say you run Juniper, a made-up bookkeeping app for freelancers, with two rivals called Ledgerly and Sumwise.

The brand list catches praise, complaints and factual errors. The competitor list catches people who are unhappy with a rival and asking what else exists. The category list catches people choosing, before they have a shortlist.

Domains are the cleanest keyword you have. Nobody types sumwise.io by accident.

Search what already exists first

Before you set up a single alert, read the last year. It tells you which subreddits matter, what people already say about you, and how noisy your name is.

Reddit search. Reddit documents filter words you can type straight into the search bar, with no space after the colon (Reddit's search help):

• subreddit:freelance juniper keeps results to one community.
• site:getjuniper.com finds posts that link to your domain.
• title:"juniper app" searches post titles only, with quotes around a phrase.
• selftext:ledgerly searches the body of text posts.

AND, OR and NOT work, but only in capitals, and brackets group them: juniper AND (invoice OR bookkeeping).

Sort matters more than it looks. Relevance, the default, is the only sort that weights rare words, so New and Top can float posts that match only your most common word. The time filter runs from past hour to all time, and comments have their own sorts: Relevance, Top and New (Reddit's sorts and filters). One quirk: post results only need some of your words, while comment results need all of them.

Google. Google indexes Reddit separately and ranks it differently, so it surfaces threads that Reddit's search buries, including ones where your name sits deep in the comments. Search site:reddit.com "ledgerly" bookkeeping, and add Google's documented after: operator, for example after:2026-01-01, to see only this year (Google's search refinements).

Log each relevant thread in a sheet: date, subreddit, link, who it is about, what was said. After twenty rows you will know which handful of subreddits to watch.

Set up Reddit keyword alerts

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

F5Bot, the free default

F5Bot emails you when a keyword appears in a new Reddit post or comment, and also watches Hacker News and Lobsters. It checks every few minutes. Keywords match post titles, URLs and comment bodies, are not case sensitive, and do not support regex.

The free plan is for personal use: 5 keywords, up to 20 alerts a day, alerts delayed by up to two hours, and in its own words, "Free accounts cannot monitor very common words or phrases." Business use, exclusion filters and common words start on Silver at $9.99 a month (F5Bot plans).

The free flags handle a lot of noise:

• whole matches whole words only. Without it, a keyword like tally also matches totally.
• only-reddit drops the other two sites.
• only-subreddit=freelance,smallbusiness limits a noisy keyword to communities where it means you.
• no-comments or no-posts if you only want one of the two.

On Silver and above, exclude= and include-any= do the rest. Juniper's main alert might read juniper whole only-reddit include-any=invoice include-any=bookkeeping include-any=app.

Reddit Pro Trends, Reddit's own dashboard

Reddit Pro is "a free suite of organic business tools", currently in beta. To join you need an account set to safe-for-work with a verified email, and you describe your business at sign-up. Its Trends tab tracks as many keywords as you like and shows the posts and comments that mention each one, the communities talking about it, and an AI summary of the top discussions (Reddit Pro Trends help). Some brand and product names are "smart keywords" that also get conversation volume and related terms.

Three limits. It only reads English conversations in public, safe-for-work communities. Reddit's help page describes a dashboard you open, not an email alert. And Reddit says the data is for internal use: no screenshots in your marketing, no downloading other people's posts.

Run both. F5Bot tells you something happened; Trends shows you the shape of the conversation once a week.

Paid tools, when free runs out

You outgrow the free tier when you need more than five keywords, need it for business use, or spend more time deleting alerts than reading them.

Syften offers a 14 day trial with no card. GummySearch, which plenty of older guides still recommend, closed to new customers on 30 November 2025; its notice says it shut down to comply with Reddit's API policies. Every tool here depends on access to Reddit's data, so pay monthly for small vendors rather than a year upfront.

For the wider field, see the Reddit monitoring tools roundup.

The relevance problem

If your brand is an ordinary word, your first week of alerts will be mostly noise. Juniper will collect gin cocktails, garden hedges and network hardware. Five fixes, in the order to try them:

1. Track the domain. getjuniper.com only ever means you.
2. Require a second word. Juniper plus invoice, bookkeeping, tax or app.
3. Restrict to subreddits where the word means you, and accept missing the odd thread elsewhere.
4. Exclude the known collisions. Gin, hedge, networks.
5. Let a model read it. F5Bot Gold and Syften Standard both offer AI filtering, where you describe in a sentence what counts as relevant.

Then measure. If fewer than one alert in five is really about you after a fortnight, tighten. If a whole week passes with nothing, loosen, because you have probably filtered out real mentions too.

Replying without getting banned

Finding the thread is half the job. The other half is not making it worse.

Reddit's rules ask you to "participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest" and not to "intentionally mislead others" (Reddit Rules). Its spam policy is more direct: if your contributions "consist primarily of links to a business that you run, own, or otherwise benefit from", be thoughtful about how often you post. Moderators decide what counts as spam in their own community, so read each subreddit's rules before you reply. Some ban brand accounts outright.

In practice:

• Say who you are in the first line. "I work at Juniper" earns patience that a reply found out later never gets back.
• Answer the question before you mention the product. If the honest answer is a competitor, say so. Nothing a brand account can post is more credible.
• Link only when asked, or when the link is the answer.
• Never use a second account or ask colleagues to upvote. Reddit's rules list content manipulation as disruptive behaviour.
• Do not message people who posted a complaint unless they invite it. Reddit names large amounts of unsolicited messages as spam.
• Leave most threads alone. A complaint about a competitor is research, not an invitation.

What to do with a week of alerts

Sort each relevant thread into one of three piles.

Reply. A direct question about you, a complaint you can fix, or a factual error. Do it while the thread is still active, not at the end of the month.

Learn. Complaints about competitors, "what do you use for X" threads, objections to your whole category. Copy the exact phrases into a document. It is the same raw material as reading competitors' three star reviews, and on Reddit people are often franker.

Ignore. Everything else, without guilt.

Once a month, count mentions of you and of each competitor, and note the subreddits they came from. A competitor whose mentions double in a month has launched something or broken something, and the threads will tell you which.

Reddit is one channel. If you also want news, blogs, review sites and search data in the same routine, the free brand monitoring stack adds them without adding a bill. Competitors' paid Reddit campaigns are a separate source again, covered in the guide to Reddit's ads library.

Reddit monitoring for competitors, every week

The stack above handles your own brand well. For competitors the work is the same, multiplied, and it is the first thing to slip when the week gets busy.

Ours, Figo, so judge accordingly. Figo checks Reddit once a week for threads that mention each competitor you track, and a language model reads every candidate and keeps only the threads that are genuinely about that company. They arrive in a Monday briefing beside the same competitor's new ads, pages, pricing and reviews, from $49 a month for three competitors.

Figo does not watch mentions of your own brand, does not alert you within minutes, and does not score sentiment. If you need to reply to threads about you the same day, F5Bot is the right tool, and it costs nothing to start.