How to Track Competitor Mentions Across Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News

Track competitor mentions with one shared keyword list and three different collectors, because Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News expose their content in fundamentally different ways:

• Reddit — use Reddit Pro Trends or native Reddit search, which covers posts and comments and supports Boolean operators and field filters.
• LinkedIn — use LinkedIn's own Posts search with filters, or a monitoring vendor whose LinkedIn sourcing you have actually asked about. Do not build a scraper: LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits it.
• Hacker News — use HN Search (Algolia-powered) for keyword retrieval and the official HN Firebase API for item, feed, and update polling.

Then send every hit into one record, deduplicate it, label its intent, score it, and route it. The mistake most teams make is assuming a product labeled "social listening" sees the same content on all three networks. It usually does not.

Answer box: the 60-second version

Why one query does not work on all three platforms

The three networks are not three copies of the same problem. They differ in what is searchable, what is automatable, and what the platform's terms permit.

That table is the whole article in miniature. Reddit gives you the richest manual search. LinkedIn gives you good manual search and constrained automation. Hacker News gives you the most open automation but splits search into a separate service.

The SCOPE framework for competitor mention tracking

Most "how to monitor competitors" advice stops at keyword setup, which is why so many teams end up with a noisy alert folder nobody opens. SCOPE forces a decision at each stage.

The critical split is between Sources and Coverage. "We support LinkedIn" is a source claim. "We surface member posts that textually mention a competitor without tagging its company page, within 30 minutes, with the original URL preserved" is a coverage claim. Only the second one tells you whether the tool solves your problem.

Step 1: Build a competitor keyword matrix, not a company name list

Monitoring only the official brand name is the single most common cause of a thin mention feed. Build a structured query set per competitor. Using a fictional competitor, "RivalFlow":

The modifier rows are editorial recommendations, not a claim that all three platforms support identical phrase or Boolean syntax. Adapt each query to the platform's documented mechanics rather than pasting one advanced expression into all three search boxes.

Step 2: Collect from Reddit

Reddit is the easiest of the three to monitor well without paying anyone.

Reddit Pro Trends. Reddit launched Pro Trends in January 2025 as a business tool for tracking "virtually any keyword or phrase" — a brand, product, or category — and seeing where and how it is discussed. Standard Keywords surface posts, comments, and communities containing your terms; supported Smart Keywords add contextual matching beyond the literal string, along with volume and related-keyword data. Reddit described Reddit Pro as free at the Trends launch, though Smart Keyword availability was explicitly described as expanding, so check current packaging and term eligibility yourself.

Native Reddit search. Reddit's help documentation says you can search posts and comments, scope to specific communities, filter by fields including author:, subreddit:, site:, title:, URL, and self-text, and combine terms with case-sensitive AND, OR, and NOT with parentheses for grouping. A workable daily sweep query:

("RivalFlow" OR "Rival Flow") AND ("alternative" OR "switch" OR "vs")

Post search sorts by Relevance, Hot, Top, New, or Comment Count, with time windows of past hour, 24 hours, week, month, year, or all time. For a monitoring routine, sort by New and restrict to the past 24 hours or past week. Comments sort separately by Relevance, Top, and New.

The Reddit API caveat that matters. Reddit's Data API documentation gives eligible free-access clients 100 queries per minute per OAuth client ID, averaged over a ten-minute window, and blocks unauthenticated traffic. That number is a technical ceiling, not a commercial permission. Reddit's Data API Terms, last revised July 20, 2026, say commercial-purpose use requires a separate agreement with Reddit. If you are an agency or a SaaS building a monitoring product, review your agreement and approved use case rather than treating the published rate limit as blanket authorization.

If you want the deeper platform-specific mechanics, our guide on how to monitor keywords on Reddit goes through each access tier in detail.

Step 3: Collect from LinkedIn

LinkedIn is where most competitor-monitoring guides get vague. Here is the concrete version.

The free manual workflow. LinkedIn's help documentation describes it directly: enter your keyword in the search bar, select the Posts tab, then apply filters. Available filters include Date posted, From member, From company, Posted by, Mentioning member, Mentioning company, Author industry, and Author company. Run separate saved views rather than trying to compose one advanced query — LinkedIn does not document an advanced Boolean post-search syntax the way Reddit does.

One distinction worth being precise about: a textual keyword match (someone types "RivalFlow" in a post) is not the same as a Mentioning company match (someone tags RivalFlow's company entity). Most guides conflate them. Run both views.

Why you should not build a scraper. LinkedIn's User Agreement says users must not develop, support, or use software, scripts, robots, crawlers, browser plugins or add-ons, or other processes to scrape or copy the service, and separately prohibits bypassing access controls and using unauthorized automated methods to access LinkedIn. "Run a browser scraper over LinkedIn search results every hour" is not a defensible architecture, whatever a blog post tells you.

The official API is not a substitute either. LinkedIn's Organization Social Action Notifications API lets applications build activity streams for LinkedIn Company Pages — but subscriptions require the rw_organization_admin permission, and access is governed by the authenticated member's administrative access to that organization. Similarly, r_organization_social is documented as retrieving your organization's posts and related engagement. The Community Management Development tier has documented limits of 500 API calls per app per 24 hours and 100 per member per 24 hours, and Social Action push notifications are disabled in that tier entirely; production-oriented Standard access requires a separate application that LinkedIn approves at its discretion.

To be precise about what that does and does not prove: the public Community Management documentation reviewed here does not document a general endpoint equivalent to "search every public LinkedIn post containing competitor X." That is an inference from the documented scope, not a LinkedIn statement that no such capability exists anywhere in its partner ecosystem. Either way, do not plan a competitor-listening system around a company-page webhook you would need admin rights on your competitor's page to use.

One more operational note: LinkedIn says deleted member posts no longer appear in search results or on the member's profile. If a mention matters, capture the evidence when you find it.

Step 4: Collect from Hacker News

Hacker News is the most technically open of the three, but it splits the job across two services — and confusing them wastes a lot of engineering time.

Useful primitives from the official API for a monitoring loop: /maxitem to walk backward through items, /newstories for up to 500 new stories, Ask HN / Show HN / Job feeds for up to 200 recent items each, and /updates for changed items and profiles. Note that "no current rate limit" is explicitly current-state wording — do not architect on the assumption it is permanent.

For competitor tracking specifically, search the domain, not just the name. HN threads frequently link to a company's site with a title that never contains the brand name in a form your keyword rule would catch. Monitor comments separately from stories, too: an HN story about an unrelated topic can carry a detailed competitor comparison forty comments deep.

If Hacker News is a major channel for your market, our dedicated guide to Hacker News monitoring covers the two-API workflow in full.

Step 5: Normalize everything into one mention record

Three collectors, one dataset. Use one row or object per discovered item:

Do not add engagement numbers across platforms. A Reddit vote score, a LinkedIn reaction count, and HN points are outputs of three different ranking systems. Summing them produces a number that means nothing. Compare engagement relative to the norms of each platform instead, and report the result as observed share of conversation — a stable monitoring sample — rather than "share of voice" or "market share," which imply a census you do not have.

A worked example

AcmeOps competes with RivalFlow. At 9:00 a.m.:

• Reddit Pro Trends surfaces a comment containing "RivalFlow" in a relevant community. Logged as pricing → comparison.
• LinkedIn Posts search finds a recent member post tagged with RivalFlow's company entity. Logged as product evaluation, mention type tagged.
• HN Search returns a new thread containing rivalflow.com. The story is logged once; a technical comparison in the comments is logged separately, because comment-level intent often differs from the story's.

Three records, one queue, no cross-platform score arithmetic.

Step 6: Score before you act

Ranking by engagement puts popular-but-useless threads at the top. Use a transparent ten-point rubric instead.

Operating bands: 8–10 goes to high-priority human review. 5–7 goes into the normal monitoring batch. 0–4 gets tagged for aggregate research or archived.

These thresholds are editorial heuristics for getting started, not empirically optimized conversion benchmarks. Tune the weights once you have a few weeks of your own data.

Free vs. automated: which setup do you actually need?

Google Alerts is a reasonable supplemental layer. Google's documentation says Alerts emails you when Google finds new matching search results, with configurable frequency, site types, language, region, and result quantity. That is web-discovery based on Google's index — not native Reddit, LinkedIn, or HN monitoring. Treat it as a safety net, not as evidence of source coverage.

The vendor question: "do you support LinkedIn?" is the wrong question

Products in the same category have materially different platform matrices. Syften explicitly states it does not support LinkedIn while covering Reddit and HN. F5Bot covers Reddit, HN, and Lobsters. Octolens and OpenScout advertise all three target networks, and Octolens's HN page states it checks Hacker News every 15 minutes — a concrete, useful number of exactly the kind most vendors do not publish.

So ask coverage questions, not logo questions:

Run a known-hit coverage test before you buy

This takes an afternoon and is worth more than any comparison table, including this one.

1. Assemble a small benchmark set of already-known, recent public mentions covering the content types you care about: a Reddit post, a Reddit comment, a LinkedIn member post, a LinkedIn company mention, an HN story, and an HN comment.
2. Run each candidate tool against that set.
3. Record: Was the item found? Which rule matched it? How long after publication did it surface? Was the source URL and context preserved? Was a deliberate false positive classified correctly? Can the result be reproduced a day and a week later? Does observed coverage match the claimed coverage?

This is a QA method, not an industry benchmark — but it turns a vendor's marketing label into an observation about your actual competitive set. Apply it to any tool you evaluate, ChatterSift included — and if you are starting the shortlist from scratch, our breakdown of the best Reddit monitoring tools covers how to compare access tiers rather than feature lists.

Monitoring vs. listening: know which one you are doing

The distinction matters for how you staff this. Sprout Social frames monitoring as gathering and tracking specific conversations and mentions — tactical, item-level work. Listening moves toward aggregate patterns: themes, trends, context, and strategic interpretation.

Competitor mention tracking needs both. The SCOPE stages S through P are monitoring. The weekly theme aggregation you build on top of the normalized dataset is listening. Teams that only do the first end up with a well-organized inbox and no insight; teams that only do the second miss the switching conversation that was live for six hours.

Claims to avoid repeating

A quick note on evidence, because this topic attracts confident numbers with no source behind them. The following are commonly repeated but were not established by the research behind this article, and you should not build a business case on them:

• "Most competitor mentions on Reddit happen in comments rather than posts" — no independent dataset establishes the proportion.
• "Responding within 30 minutes doubles conversion probability" — no credible source; treat urgency benchmarks skeptically.
• "Competitor-mention monitoring increases win rate by X%" — no controlled causal evidence identified.
• "Google Alerts misses most Reddit, LinkedIn, and HN mentions" — the documentation supports only that Alerts emails matching Google Search results; no measured miss rate was established.
• "AI sentiment and relevance filtering is 90%+ accurate" — vendor product pages are not independent accuracy benchmarks.
• "Tool X has complete LinkedIn coverage" — every current vendor claim reviewed here is self-reported.

Treat AI relevance and sentiment scoring as a triage layer, not ground truth. It is genuinely useful for reducing a 400-item daily feed to 40. It is not a substitute for a human reading the 8-and-above items.

FAQ

Can you track competitor mentions on Reddit for free? Yes. Reddit described Reddit Pro as free when it launched Pro Trends, and native Reddit search supports keyword searches across posts and comments, field filters, Boolean logic, New sorting, and recent time windows at no cost. Recheck current Reddit Pro packaging before relying on pricing.

Does Reddit search support Boolean operators? Yes. Reddit's help documentation says AND, OR, and NOT are supported and case-sensitive, and parentheses can be used for grouping.

Can Reddit competitor monitoring include comments? Yes. Reddit supports comment search, and Reddit Pro's Standard Keywords are documented as surfacing posts, comments, and communities that mention the specified term.

How do you find competitor mentions on LinkedIn? Search the competitor keyword in LinkedIn's search bar, select the Posts tab, and narrow with filters such as Date posted, From company, or Mentioning company. Run textual-keyword and Mentioning-company views separately — they return different sets.

Can you scrape LinkedIn to automate competitor tracking? No, not as a compliant default. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits using software, scripts, robots, crawlers, browser plugins or add-ons, and similar processes to scrape or copy the service, and prohibits unauthorized automated access.

Can the official LinkedIn API monitor every public post containing a competitor's name? The public Community Management documentation does not document such an endpoint. Social action notifications and organization permissions are tied to Company Pages the authenticated member is authorized to administer. That conclusion is an inference from the documented scope rather than an absolute statement about every LinkedIn partner interface.

How do you track Hacker News mentions automatically? Use HN Search's Algolia-powered REST API for keyword and domain retrieval, and the official HN Firebase API for item, feed, and update polling. They solve different jobs and are commonly used together.

Does the official Hacker News API have a rate limit? Its current documentation states there is currently no rate limit. That wording is time-sensitive — check the official documentation before assuming it still holds.

Is Google Alerts enough for competitor mention tracking? Use it as a supplemental web-discovery layer. Alerts emails you when Google finds matching search results; it is not documented as a native Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News monitoring service.

Is there one tool that monitors Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News? Some vendors say yes — Octolens and OpenScout both advertise the three platforms. But verify at the content-type level: Syften explicitly states LinkedIn is not supported, and F5Bot covers Reddit and HN but not LinkedIn. Treat product pages as claims to test, not coverage audits.

What competitor keywords should you track? Start with exact brand and product names, the domain, meaningful spacing variants, and common misspellings. Then layer contextual terms: alternatives, comparisons, switching, pricing, support, and product problems. Reddit's own guidance recommends brand terms, product names, misspellings, and industry terminology.

Should competitor mention volume be compared directly across the three networks? Cautiously. The three expose different content types, access models, search mechanics, and engagement systems. Report "total mentions" as the volume observed by a stable monitoring methodology, not as a comparable census of each platform.

Where to start this week

1. Write your keyword matrix for your top two competitors — nine query classes each, not one company name.
2. Set up Reddit Pro Trends keywords and one saved native Reddit search sorted by New over the past week.
3. Save three LinkedIn Posts searches: keyword + Date posted, Mentioning company, and From company.
4. Run your competitor's domain through HN Search and check both stories and comments.
5. Open a spreadsheet with the mention-record fields above and log everything you find for two weeks.

After two weeks you will know your real mention volume, which platform actually carries your competitive conversation, and whether a paid tool is solving a problem you have. That is a much better basis for buying software than a feature comparison table.