Reddit keyword alerts tell you when a post on Reddit mentions your brand, a competitor or a topic you care about. Reddit does not send a notification for each new post with your keyword. For businesses, the free Reddit Pro shows matching posts in a dashboard and sends a weekly email. For alerts on each post, there are free options with limits: F5Bot by email for personal use, RedditAlert for two alerts, and the Alerts for Reddit app for subreddits you follow. Business use with more keywords means a paid plan. The old workaround, a Reddit search turned into an RSS feed, stops working on November 13, 2026.
I never watched Reddit for my own products. I make AAWP and ClickWhale, two WordPress plugins. If something about them came up on Reddit, I found it by hand or a customer pointed me to it. Following the right subreddits every day was more work than I could justify, and that gap is why I built KeywordWatchr. I have not used every tool below myself. What this guide says about them comes from their own pages, as of November 2026.
Can Reddit notify you when someone uses a keyword?
Reddit’s notifications are about your own account: replies to you, mentions of your username, chats and posts Reddit recommends. There is no setting that sends you a post because it contains a word.
The closest built-in feature is Trends in Reddit Pro, Reddit’s free toolkit for businesses. According to Reddit’s help pages, you add keywords and get a dashboard of recent posts and comments that use them, plus a weekly email summary. It covers public, safe-for-work, English-language conversations. You can open the dashboard any day and find a fresh thread there, but Reddit does not push each new post to you.
Free and simple ways to get Reddit keyword alerts
F5Bot
F5Bot has run since 2017 and watches Reddit posts and comments, along with Hacker News and Lobsters.
- Sign up with an email address at f5bot.com.
- Add a keyword, for example your product name.
- Each alert email links to the post or comment.
The free plan is for personal use. It covers 5 keywords and 20 alerts a day, and an alert can arrive up to two hours after F5Bot finds the match. Limiting a keyword to certain subreddits is part of the free basic filters. Exclusion words and the full post text in the email start with the paid Silver plan, which is for non-commercial use. For business use, F5Bot points to Gold at $49.99 a month.
Alerts for Reddit (phone app)
Alerts for Reddit is a phone app that sends push notifications for new posts in the subreddits and from the users you follow in it. Keyword filters narrow that down to the posts that matter. According to its site, the free version notifies within 10 minutes, and a paid upgrade within 30 seconds. It watches the places you pick, not all of Reddit, so it suits a handful of subreddits better than a brand name that could come up anywhere.
RedditAlert
RedditAlert emails you when a Reddit conversation matches your alert, within 30 seconds by its own account, and can draft a reply for you to edit. The free plan covers 2 alerts and 25 alert emails a month, without a credit card or a Reddit login.
Google Alerts with site:reddit.com
Google Alerts accepts search operators, so a query like "your brand" site:reddit.com asks it for Reddit pages only.
- Open google.com/alerts and type the query.
- Click Show options. Set How often to As-it-happens or At most once a day, and How many to All results.
- Choose a Language and a Region, pick email or RSS under Deliver to, then click Create Alert.
Google Alerts only reports pages as Google finds them, so whether a new thread shows up depends on when Google indexes it. Before you rely on it for Reddit, compare a week of alerts with Reddit’s own search for the same term.
I have kept Google Alerts running for AAWP and ClickWhale for years, but only for the web. I never used it for Reddit. Its useful matches were blog posts about the plugins, which let me thank the authors and invite some of them to our affiliate program. It also turned up sites that shared the plugins illegally. Some matches were in other languages, Chinese for example, and had nothing to do with us, so set the language. Our page on Google Alerts alternatives compares it with tools that cover more sources.
What happened to Reddit RSS feeds
For years, the free workaround was to search Reddit, sort by New and add .rss to the address. A feed reader, IFTTT or Zapier then turned every new result into an alert. On September 30, 2026, Reddit announced that it stops supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026, because the feeds had become a route for scraping. Outside communities you moderate, Reddit offers no replacement.
If you built an applet or a zap on a Reddit feed, it stops receiving new Reddit posts after that date. Move the keyword to one of the tools in this guide before then.
Reddit keyword alert tools compared
| Method | Reads | How fast | Lands in | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reddit Pro Trends | Posts and comments; public, safe-for-work, English | Dashboard any time, weekly email | Dashboard, email | Free for businesses |
| Alerts for Reddit | New posts in subreddits and from users you follow, with keyword filters | Within 10 minutes free, 30 seconds paid | Phone push | Free app, paid upgrade |
| RedditAlert | Conversations; posts or comments not stated | Within 30 seconds, its stated target | Free for 2 alerts and 25 emails a month | |
| F5Bot Free | Posts and comments | Up to 2 hours | Free, personal use only | |
| F5Bot Gold | Posts and comments | Instant or scheduled | Email, Slack, Discord, RSS | $49.99 a month |
| Google Alerts | Reddit pages Google indexes | When Google finds them | Email, RSS | Free |
| RedditComber | Posts and comments, by its own account | “Real time”, per its site | Reddit inbox | Not stated on its homepage |
| Syften | Posts and comments | Under a minute, its stated target | Email from $29.95 a month; Slack from $49.95 | From $29.95 a month |
| KeywordWatchr | Posts, not comments yet | Checked daily; sent weekly on Standard, daily on Pro | Email; Slack and webhook from Pro | $9 a month on Standard, $29 on Pro (5 alerts each) |
Prices and speeds come from each provider’s own pages in November 2026. “Real time”, “30 seconds” and “under a minute” are their claims, not our measurements. RedditComber sends matches to your Reddit inbox after you sign in with your Reddit account; its homepage does not say what it costs.
If you want to reply within minutes and the talk in your subreddits happens in the comments, look at Syften, F5Bot Gold or RedditAlert. If you only want to know whether anyone mentions you at all, and the use is personal, F5Bot costs nothing. GummySearch, a Reddit audience research tool, shuts down on December 1, 2026; our GummySearch alternative page covers the options.
KeywordWatchr checks Reddit once a day and sends new posts as one digest: weekly on Standard, daily on Pro by email, to a Slack channel or to a webhook. An alert can be narrowed to the subreddits of your market and can skip posts that contain exclusion words. The same account watches X, Facebook groups and the web, so you read one list instead of checking four places. It does not read Reddit comments yet, and it will not get you into a thread within the hour. That trade is deliberate: one list a day is easier to keep up with than an alert every few minutes.
Which keywords to track on Reddit
Brand and competitor names
Start with your product name, its common misspellings and your domain. Add the two or three competitors your customers compare you with: a thread where someone is unhappy with one of them can be a better lead than one that names you. Our page on competitor monitoring shows how that works in KeywordWatchr.
If you sell something people can download, consider your product name with “nulled” or “free download”. On the web, Google Alerts brought up sites sharing AAWP illegally; an alert on these words is how you would look for the same on Reddit.
For AAWP, a first set would look like this:
AAWPandaawp pluginfor the brandLassoandEasyAzon, the two competing plugins customers mention mostamazon affiliate pluginfor people looking for a solutionAAWP nulledfor illegal copies
After a week, read what came in. Drop the keywords that brought only noise, add exclusion words for the false matches that keep coming back, and narrow broad words to the subreddits where they mean what you mean.
Problem phrases
Our Brand Radar for Freemius shows how many threads a brand-name alert misses. Freemius handles checkout, licensing and sales tax for developers who sell WordPress plugins and SaaS products. Between October 5 and October 27, 2026, the radar found nine Reddit threads that were openings for Freemius: seven in r/SaaS, one in r/stripe and one in r/microsaas. None of them was about Freemius.
An alert on “Freemius” would not have found these threads. Three of their titles, for example:
- “US based SaaS companies: Are you collecting VAT from EU/UK customers?”
- “Payment Provider For Complex Payment Flows?”
- “founders without a registered company, how do you collect payments for subscriptions on your SAAS product?”
Each title contains a phrase that could work as a keyword: VAT, payment provider, collect payments. We did not run alerts on these phrases; the titles only show which words people used. Look at the words your own customers used before they found you, and turn the shortest of them into keywords.
Cutting the noise
- Exact phrases.
"affiliate plugin"in quotes instead of the two words anywhere in a post, where the tool supports it. - Subreddits. Limit an alert to the communities of your market. A product name that is also a common word means something else in r/gaming.
- Exclusion words. Leave out posts with words of the other meaning, and your own username.
Each filter also drops some posts you would have wanted. Run a new alert without filters for a week, look at what came in, then narrow it.
What to do when an alert comes in
Not every alert needs a reply. A customer once pointed me to a Reddit thread where someone asked for a feature AAWP did not have. The useful response was the feature: the thread showed us there was a need, and we built it.
When you do reply:
- Read the subreddit rules first. Many communities ban self-promotion or allow it only in a weekly thread.
- Answer the question before you mention your product. If your product is the answer, say that you made it.
- Reply while the thread is still active, so the person who asked is likely to see it.
- Thank people who recommend you, in the thread or by direct message.