How to track competitor mentions online free, then with a paid tool

How to track competitor mentions online free: the setup

To track competitor mentions online for free, create one alert per rival name, product and domain in Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts, add F5Bot for Reddit and Hacker News, and read the results weekly. Talkwalker says you can set up alerts for your competitor's keywords.

F5Bot's competitor guide says to add each rival's name as a keyword, then product names and the domain as separate keywords. On Reddit, search each rival name sorted by New, or limit the search to post titles with Reddit's title filter.

F5Bot's free tier is for personal use; Gold is $49.99 a month, billed monthly, and F5Bot lists it for professionals and small businesses. For X (formerly Twitter), search each rival name with X's advanced search while logged in.

Keyword budget: how many names you really track

Every phrase is one keyword, so rival names add up. In Brand24, each word or phrase you enter is treated as a separate keyword. A brand, a product, a domain and two competitors already use five. Brand24 allows 3 keywords on Individual, 7 on Team and 12 on Pro, as read on October 24, 2026.

F5Bot Free allows 5 keywords and Gold 200. Size the plan by names first.

Common rival names and noise

Brand24's competitive-analysis guide warns that a common rival name brings irrelevant mentions, and F5Bot's free tier cannot watch very common words. In Brand24, excluded keywords keep unwanted mentions out of later collection, but mentions collected before you set one stay in the project, and its help center lists Boolean search with AND, OR and NOT among its noise tips.

F5Bot's include-any flag, which matches only when a word such as "alternative" appears too, is a paid-plan flag, and a business is pointed to Gold. Brand24 says Smart Context Search, an add-on from Pro, suits brand names with several meanings.

Paid competitor tracking: projects and AI Insights

Brand24 lets you open one project per competitor, which its help center suggests for comparison, or track all rivals in one project. Brand24 tracks each competitor name as a keyword, and from Pro its AI Insights report on competitors weekly or monthly; Brand24 pricing shows how the plans size by keywords.

AI Insights covers up to 2 projects on Pro and up to 5 on Business, and each report covers the last 7 days or a full month. Pro is $499 a month, billed monthly, and Business $699 a month, billed monthly. Syften says it can monitor competitor names and comparison searches in communities, and Syften Entry is $29.95 a month.

When free competitor tracking is enough

Free tracking is enough for two or three rivals with low volume: a handful of alerts a week, read in one sitting. A paid plan earns its keywords when you need reports for a team, alerts in minutes or sources the free tools do not list. Free brand monitoring tools compares the free options, and Brand24 alternatives covers paid rivals.

Load your rivals into Brand24 for 14 days before choosing a plan. The trial allows up to 10 keywords and 30k mentions on Pro features, room for your own names and several rivals.