Reddit Brand Monitoring: AI mentions, sentiment and pain points on the Apify Store →
Tutorial article for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium and Hashnode. The owner publishes it, discloses authorship, and records the URL in brief.json → marketing.links. Until then /actor-deploy --assets hosts this file as the Actor's tutorial page. Actor: Reddit Brand Monitoring.
Reddit is where people ask "what should I use instead of X?", complain about a bug before they open a ticket, and compare you with your competitors in public. If you run a SaaS product, a DTC brand or a community, those threads are worth answering — the person asking for an alternative is deciding this week.
Finding them is the hard part. A keyword search for a brand like "notion" returns the app, the English word ("the notion of free will"), AutoModerator replies, [deleted] posts, community pages and the same threads you already saw last week. Raw Reddit scrapers on the Apify Store solve the collection — and they do it well — but they bill every row they return, junk included ($0.001–$0.004 a row in the reddit brand monitoring search on 2026-09-26), and hand you a spreadsheet to sort by hand.
What a brand, product or community team actually wants is shorter: only the new mentions that are really about us, ranked, with the one to answer first.
Reddit Brand Monitoring runs a Reddit scraper on your own Apify account — Reddit Scraper Lite (trudax/reddit-scraper-lite) by default, or harshmaur's Reddit Scraper — for your brand and competitor terms, then:
[deleted] and bot posts, ads, NSFW, your excludeTerms, and dictionary-word hits of an ambiguous brand name.reply, route_to_support, route_to_product, monitor — with the author's profile link.You pay one event per qualified mention: $0.002 on the basic tier, $0.009 with AI. The first 25 qualified mentions on your account are free. Off-topic, bot, deleted and already-seen rows are never charged.
Open the Store page and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with nine sample Notion posts and comments. Press Start: the demo returns five qualified mentions in seconds and charges nothing. The philosophy comment about "the notion of free will", the AutoModerator reply, the deleted post and the community row are the four that were dropped.
The top row of that demo, on the basic tier (real output):
{"mentionId": "t3_1fq2a7x", "relevanceScore": 90, "mentionType": "alternative_seeking", "sentiment": "mixed",
"priority": "high", "suggestedAction": "reply",
"evidenceQuote": "Looking for an alternative to Notion that works offline", "aiStatus": "off"}The same mention with AI on (real output of the AI example, 2026-09-26; wording varies by model, the fields and the grounding rules do not):
{"mentionId": "t3_1fq2a7x", "relevanceScore": 95, "priority": "high", "suggestedAction": "reply",
"insight": "User finds Notion slow and unusable offline, wants a tool that works offline with table/database features.",
"evidenceQuote": "Notion is so slow on my laptop and useless on the train without wifi.",
"competitorsMentioned": ["obsidian"], "aiStatus": "ok"}That second block is the reason the AI tier exists: it tells you why the user is leaving and quotes the proof, which you would otherwise dig out of a 37-comment thread.
In the form, type your brandTerms (e.g. acme crm), optionally competitorTerms (hubspot) and one line in brandBrief ("Acme CRM — the sales CRM for agencies, not the cartoon company"). Typing your brand switches the run to the live Reddit search. Keep the maxDiscoveryChargeUsd cap of $0.50 for the first search — it bounds what the Reddit scraper may spend on your account.
Your first 25 qualified mentions are free, so the first real search shows you the AI tier at no cost for the Actor's part. The scraper's own cost for 75 results is about $0.32 on Reddit Scraper Lite (75 × $0.004 + the $0.02 start fee).
Actions → Schedule, weekly or daily, and put your address in notifyEmail: each run with new mentions e-mails the digest (top 10 with links, and the change vs last run — "complaints 5 → 9"). dedupeAcrossRuns is on by default, so you pay only for what is new. For urgent threads set slackWebhookUrl or webhookUrl with alertMinPriority: high.
A weekly monitor for your brand and two competitors, 100 results per term: Reddit Scraper Lite charges $1.22 on your account (300 × $0.004 + $0.02). If about 90 of the 300 are on-topic mentions (an estimate — your share depends on how common your brand's name is), the Actor adds 90 × $0.002 = $0.18: $1.40 a week in total, $0.016 per qualified mention. With AI on: 90 × $0.009 plus about $0.18 of model tokens — $2.21 a week. The Actor's $0.002 basic price is below the $0.0023 median of the Actors the reddit brand monitoring Store search shows.
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/reddit-brand-monitoring-ai").call(run_input={
"sourceMode": "actor",
"brandTerms": ["acme crm"],
"competitorTerms": ["hubspot"],
"brandBrief": "Acme CRM — the sales CRM for small agencies, not the cartoon company.",
"maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
print(item["priority"], item["mentionType"], item["url"])Upsert on dedupeKey (reddit:t3_…) in a Sheet or CRM and a weekly run only ever adds rows. Ready-to-import n8n workflows (weekly mentions → Google Sheet + Slack; routed mentions → Zendesk / Linear) are linked from the README's Integrations section. In Claude or Cursor, add the Apify MCP server with this Actor and ask: "Find this week's Reddit mentions of Acme CRM and summarise the high-priority ones with their quotes."
If your brand name is unique and every hit is about you, a plain keyword alert is cheaper per match. This Actor pays off when your name is a common word ("notion", "linear", "monday"), when you monitor competitors too, or when you want the pain point, the quote and the next action instead of a raw hit.
Try the free demo on the Store page — no key and no setup.
Reddit Brand Monitoring: AI mentions, sentiment and pain points on the Apify Store →