How to track brand mentions of a dev tool on X, Reddit and YouTube
One search per network, an AI filter for names that are also ordinary words, and a signed webhook into the channel your engineers already read.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team
3 min read
To track brand mentions of a developer tool, run one search per place developers talk about it (X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and Hacker News) and send every match to the Slack or Discord channel your team already reads. AyeWatch covers the first four from one account and filters each post with a plain-English rule, and F5Bot fills in Hacker News.
Why a plain keyword alert fails for dev tools
Developer products tend to have short, ordinary names. Call yours Relay. A raw keyword alert for "relay" brings back relay races, electrical relays and every Relay-something library on GitHub, and by day three the channel is muted. Two fixes keep it useful: a tighter query, and a second pass that reads the post for meaning before it reaches you.
Set up one search per network
| Where people talk | Monitor | Example query |
|---|---|---|
| X | AyeWatch X search | "relay cli" OR relaycli -from:relaycli |
| AyeWatch Reddit search | "relay cli" OR relaycli |
|
| YouTube | AyeWatch YouTube search | relay cli tutorial |
| AyeWatch LinkedIn post search | "relay cli" |
|
| Hacker News | F5Bot keyword | relaycli |
The X search takes X's own operators: quotes, OR, a minus sign, from: and lang:. Adding -from: with your own handle hides your team's posts so you only see other people. Reddit search accepts quotes and OR and runs across every subreddit at once. YouTube search looks at videos uploaded today, which is how you catch a new tutorial or review on day one. LinkedIn post search reads posts from the last day.
Add the filter that does the real work
On each AyeWatch monitor, fill in "Only alert me about" with something like: posts about Relay the command-line tool, including bug reports, comparisons with other tools, questions about setup and launch posts. AI reads every new post against that sentence and passes only the ones that fit. A post about a relay race never gets through, while "anyone tried relaycli for monorepos?" does.
Route the alerts where engineers look
Push and the in-app feed come with every plan. Paid plans add email, Slack, Discord and webhooks, plus a REST API for creating and editing monitors from code.
The webhook is the developer-friendly option. Each account has a single endpoint, and it receives updates from every monitor. A few details from the docs:
- The endpoint must be public HTTPS, accept a JSON POST and answer with a 2xx status within 10 seconds.
- The body carries
topic_name, a short AIheadline, thecontentand anupdate_id. Store theupdate_id, because failed deliveries are retried and the same update can arrive twice. - Each request is signed in the
X-AyeWatch-Signatureheader with HMAC-SHA256. Check it against the raw request bytes, not re-serialized JSON.
From there your own handler decides what happens: post bug reports to #support, comparisons to #marketing, and everything else to a daily thread. If you'd rather not run a handler at all, the built-in Slack and Discord connections drop each alert straight into a channel, and you choose the channels for each monitor separately.
Searches worth adding next
- Your name with
down OR brokenon X, so you hear about outages from users before the status page does. - A competitor's name with
alternative OR switching, to find people who are shopping. - "Is there a tool that" in the subreddit for your language or framework, filtered to requests your product answers.
What this setup misses
AyeWatch reads public posts only. Reddit comments, YouTube comments and private subreddits are skipped, so a thread that mentions you only in replies won't trigger an alert. If marketing wants charts of mention volume and sentiment for a quarterly report, a listening dashboard such as Brand24 is built for that job.
Cost
AyeWatch has a free preview with no card, and its paid plans begin at $9 a month, billed in monitoring credits. F5Bot's free tier is for personal use; its paid tiers start at $12.99 a month. The Topics API and webhook reference live in the AyeWatch API documentation.