Free tool
Hand-writing boolean queries like ("your brand") -site:facebook.com gets tedious fast, and one misplaced quote silently breaks the whole thing. Type your brand below and get correct, ready-to-copy queries for Google Alerts, Reddit, Hacker News, and X.
Type a brand name above and the queries appear here, ready to copy. Nothing is sent anywhere; this all runs in your browser.
A query you run by hand catches mentions on the day you remember to run it. The whole point of monitoring is the days you forget, so wire each query into Google Alerts once and let the mentions come to you:
Build your query above and copy the Google search / Google Alerts variant.
Go to google.com/alerts while signed in to a Google account, and paste the query into the search box at the top.
Google shows a live preview below the box. If it is mostly noise, add narrowing keywords or more site exclusions and paste the updated query.
Click "Show options". Frequency "As-it-happens", sources "Automatic", and deliver to your email. Then click "Create Alert".
Create one alert per variant you care about: the general web query, the Reddit-only one, and competitor mentions. Separate alerts are easier to tune than one giant query.
If you would rather not maintain queries at all, F5Bot does the alerting part for free over email. We compared it with the paid options in our F5Bot alternative guide and rounded up the wider field in the 10 best Reddit monitoring tools.
After the alert fires
Queries tell you a thread exists. You still have to judge whether it is worth replying to, what to say, and how to say it without tripping Reddit’s spam filter. CueScout does that judging for you: it finds the threads where a reply genuinely helps, scores them, and drafts a reply you post yourself.
Build the Reddit-only query above (it starts with site:reddit.com), then go to google.com/alerts, paste the query into the search box, and click "Create Alert". Under "Show options", set frequency to "As-it-happens" and sources to "Automatic". Google will email you when it indexes a new Reddit thread that matches.
The same core operators as regular Google search: exact-match quotes ("your brand"), OR between alternatives, the minus sign to exclude terms or whole sites (-site:facebook.com), and site: to restrict results to one domain. Parentheses group OR-lists. AND is implied between terms, so you never need to type it.
Because most matches on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn are your own brand account, reposts of your links, or spam pages. Excluding those domains leaves the results that matter for monitoring: forum threads, blog posts, reviews, and community discussions where someone else is talking about you.
It depends on when Google crawls the thread, which ranges from a few hours to several days. Bigger subreddits get indexed faster. Google Alerts also mostly catches posts, so a comment that mentions your brand deep in a thread often never triggers an alert at all.
Yes. Add competitor names in the competitors field and you get a parallel set of queries. Reddit threads asking "is [competitor] worth it" or "[competitor] alternative" are some of the highest-intent conversations you can find, since the person is already shopping in your category.
Three big ones. Coverage: Google indexes a fraction of Reddit comments, so you miss mentions. Lag: alerts arrive hours or days after the thread peaked, and Reddit threads earn most of their replies in the first day. Noise: a keyword match tells you your brand was mentioned, not whether the thread is worth your time. Queries are a fine free start; the ceiling is real.