How to Track What People Say About Your Brand Online for Free

Image: Image prompt: Cinematic 3D artistic illustration, 16:9. A sleek emerald glass control desk with a glowing radar screen at its center, small lime blips marking brand mentions. Around it float frosted glass panels showing an alert bell, a discussion thread, a gold star review card, a social feed and an AI chat bubble, each linked to the radar by thin lime light lines. A simple glass spreadsheet log glows in the foreground. Deep dark green background, soft fog, cinematic lighting. Bold clean white text overlay at the top: "Track Your Brand Mentions for Free". Small lime wordmark in the bottom right corner: "Sublime Plus". No real brand logos. Premium, minimal, high detail.

Most brands find out what people say about them by accident. A friend forwards a Reddit thread. A customer mentions a review on a call. Someone on the team asks ChatGPT about the company out of curiosity and gets an unpleasant surprise.

You don't have to wait for the surprise. You can keep a steady eye on your brand without paying for an expensive monitoring platform. It takes a bit of setup and about half an hour a week.

This is the free setup I'd recommend, and it's close to what we started with at Sublime.

Step 1: Set up Google Alerts

Google Alerts is free and takes two minutes. Create alerts for your brand name, common misspellings of it, your founders' names and your main product names. Google emails you when new pages mention them.

It won't catch everything, especially on social media, but it's a solid base for news, blogs and websites.

Step 2: Watch Reddit

Reddit is where some of the most honest conversations about brands happen, and those threads can rank on Google and feed AI answers. Search your brand name on Reddit regularly and sort by new.

For automatic alerts, free tools like F5Bot email you when a keyword shows up in new Reddit posts and comments. Add your brand name, your product names and a couple of competitor names while you're at it.

Step 3: Turn on review notifications

Switch on notifications for every review site you're listed on: Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, Yelp, G2 or whatever fits your business. New reviews should reach you the same day, so you can reply while it still matters.

Step 4: Search social platforms

Search your brand name and handle on X, TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn once a week. Plenty of mentions don't tag you, so searching is the only way to find them.

Step 5: Ask the AI tools

This is the step most brands skip. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews a few questions about your brand and your category. Note whether you're mentioned and how you're described. I wrote a full walkthrough in how to check if ChatGPT mentions your brand.

Step 6: Keep one simple log

Put everything in one spreadsheet: the date, where you found it, what was said, whether it was positive, neutral or negative, and what you did about it. After a couple of months, patterns jump out. Maybe complaints about shipping keep coming back. Maybe one subreddit loves you. That's what should shape your next decisions.

What to do with what you find

Thank people who say nice things. Reply calmly to criticism, especially where others can see it. Correct wrong information at the source. And if something negative starts gaining traction, act early. What to do when a negative Reddit thread ranks for your brand name walks through that situation.

When free stops being enough

This setup works well for a small brand. Once mentions start coming in daily across many platforms, it gets heavy to manage by hand, and spotting a problem isn't the same as fixing it.

That's where the Sublime marketing team comes in. At Sublime+, we track how your brand shows up on Reddit and in AI answers, then actively improve it. You can reach Sublime Plus Marketing at sublime-plus.com.