How to monitor my brand name online for free, in five steps

How to monitor my brand name online for free: the five steps

To monitor your brand name online for free, set Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts on every spelling, add a Reddit search feed, and count what arrives over two weeks. The same five steps monitor a company name.

1. Write down the name, its common misspellings, your product names and your domain. Brand24's help center names brand names, product names and domains as keywords to set up, and advises against full URLs and email addresses.
2. Create a Google Alert for each name at google.com/alerts and choose Create Alert.
3. Create a Talkwalker Alert for each name at talkwalker.com/alerts, then verify your email address.
4. Follow Reddit with a search sorted by New or its feed, and add F5Bot's free tier, which is for personal use; a business is pointed to F5Bot Gold.
5. Count what arrives for two weeks: which names, which sources, how many a day and how many are noise.

Setting up Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts

The Google Alerts form asks how often (as-it-happens, at most once a day or at most once a week), which sources (automatic, news, blogs, web, video, books, discussions or finance), a language and region, and how many results (only the best or all).

Talkwalker Alerts asks for the topic, a result type (news, Twitter, blogs or discussion forums), how often alerts arrive, and delivery by email, RSS or Slack. It sends to any email address, not only a Google account, offers a preview before you save, and warns that as-it-happens plus all results can flood your inbox, so start with only the most engaged results.

Reddit, Hacker News and X for free

F5Bot's Free tier watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for up to 5 keywords and keeps 7 days of match history. Alerts can arrive up to 2 hours late, and Free accounts cannot monitor very common words. F5Bot says Gold is built for monitoring a business, a client or something you sell, at $49.99 a month, billed monthly.

Reddit search results also load as a feed, at an address of the form reddit.com/search.rss?q=your-name&sort=new, which a feed reader can follow. Reddit's search help articles describe sorting by New but not this feed address. X (formerly Twitter) advanced search works while you are logged in, with fields for exact phrases, accounts and dates.

Signs the free alerts are not enough

Four signs mean free alerts are not enough:

• You must send reports to a boss or client. Brand24's daily and weekly email reports go to added recipients.
• You need alerts in minutes, not hours. Brand24 says new mentions on Pro and above are typically collected in a matter of minutes.
• You need sources beyond web, news, blogs and forums, such as TikTok, which Brand24 offers from Team.
• You track several names. A brand, a product, a domain and two competitors already use five keywords.

A new or small brand may return little at first; Brand24's help center lists a project that is too small among the reasons.

A free trial before any paid plan

Paid tools come later. Brand24 gives 14 days free with no credit card, on Pro features with up to 10 keywords and 30k mentions, and a new project starts with a sample of data from the last 30 days. At day 14 you choose a subscription plan or access is restricted.

Free brand monitoring tools compares each free option, Talkwalker Alerts vs Google Alerts sets the two alerts side by side, and the Brand24 free trial page covers the trial in full.