Your competitors have customers, and those customers talk on Reddit. They ask for help, they complain, and every so often they ask the room for something better. Watching for your competitors' names is one of the more useful things you can set up, and it runs on the same machinery as watching your own name. F5Bot is a free service that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites for the keywords you pick and emails you when one comes up, so pointing it at a competitor takes about a minute.
The payoffs are worth pulling apart:
Add each competitor's name as a keyword. Then add their product names and their domain as separate keywords, the same way you would for your own brand. Keeping them separate makes it easier to tell later which one is generating the interesting threads.
If a competitor's name is also a common word, you may run into the free plan's limit on common keywords. The filtering below helps either way.
A competitor's name on its own will pull in plenty of chatter you do not need. The fix is to pair the name with the kind of language that signals what you are after.
The include and exclude filters on F5Bot's paid plans are built for this. To catch switching threads, require the name to show up alongside words like "alternative," "vs," or "instead of." To skip noise, exclude the terms that keep producing dead-end matches. The top tiers go further with F5Bot's AI-powered filtering. Instead of guessing at the right keywords to require, you describe what you want in plain English and let the AI read each match and decide. You could write something like "only show me people who are frustrated with [competitor] and looking to switch," and it keeps the threads that fit and drops the rest. You can read how the filters work in the documentation, and there is more on buying-signal language in the find customers guide.
Be careful here. Reddit can smell a competitor swooping in to trash a rival, and it goes badly. If someone is asking for an alternative and your product honestly fits, say who you are and be straight about it. Answer their actual question first. Do not run down the competitor, and do not pretend to be a neutral happy customer. Being honest and useful works far better than being salesy, and it is the only approach that does not eventually blow up.
F5Bot's free plan will get you started, with the usual limits: a delay before alerts go out, no monitoring of the most common keywords, and a daily cap on matches per keyword. Since this is competitive work, the paid plans tend to pay off quickly. They deliver in a timely manner, raise the caps, open up common keywords, and add the include, exclude, and AI-powered filters that make competitor monitoring actually manageable. Compare them on the pricing page.
Pick your top competitor, make a free account, and add their name as a keyword. This is the mirror image of watching your own company, so the brand mention guide is a good companion read.