F5Bot keeps an eye on Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites, and emails you the moment a keyword you picked shows up. Give it a word or phrase, and you get an email when that word shows up in a new Reddit post or comment. Most people find F5Bot while looking to watch their company name, but the same setup works for anything you can put into words.
People point it at all kinds of things:
If you can describe it as a word or short phrase, you can watch for it.
F5Bot looks at the title of a post, the link it points to, and the text of every comment. When your keyword appears in any of those, you get an email. It does not look at usernames unless you ask it to.
Matching is not case-sensitive, so "Python" and "python" are the same to it. By default it matches the letters wherever they appear, which means a keyword like "cat" would also match "category" and "education." If that is a problem, turn on whole-word matching and it will only match "cat" on its own. The full set of rules is on the keyword documentation page.
The first time you watch a common word, you will probably get matches you do not care about, and a handful of settings trim it down:
only-reddit to ignore
Hacker News and Lobsters, for example.only-url=/r/somesubreddit/ keep you inside the
communities you care about.One common mix-up: people combine only-reddit with only-url= expecting it to
mean "this subreddit only," and instead get all of Reddit. There is a short
write-up on why that happens here.
For real control, F5Bot's paid plans add include and exclude filters, which let you require or forbid other words near your keyword. The top tiers go a step further with F5Bot's AI-powered filtering, which judges a match by what it means instead of the exact letters, which is what finally makes a noisy keyword usable.
F5Bot groups your matches together so you get a tidy email instead of a pile of them. How fast they go out depends on your plan. The free plan sends on a delay. Paid plans send promptly, and can also hold alerts for a daily digest at times you pick. You can see the differences on the pricing page.
You can get a lot done on the free plan. A few things to know: alerts come on a delay, the most common words can't be tracked, and each keyword stops after a set number of hits per day. Paying lifts those: alerts go out quickly, the caps go up, common words are allowed, and you get the include, exclude, and AI filters for cutting down noise. If you're using this for work, it's worth a look at the pricing page.
Make a free account, add one keyword, and wait for the first email. You can always add more later. If you are setting this up to watch your own company, the brand mention guide goes deeper on that.