5 ways to get alerted when keywords appear on Reddit

Reddit lets you follow individual posts and subscribe to a subreddit's new posts via the bell icon. That works for staying on top of 1-3 communities you already know. What it can't do is tell you when a keyword appears anywhere on Reddit: there is no native way to get notified when someone mentions your brand, your competitor, or a problem you solve.

Reddit exposes RSS feeds for almost everything. A subreddit is reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT/.rss, and a keyword search is reddit.com/search.rss?q=YOUR+KEYWORD&sort=new. Pipe those into Feedly or Inoreader and you get a unified feed of matches. It works, it's free, and it covers searches Reddit's own notifications can't. The cost is your time: readers poll every 15-60 minutes, you get every partial match raw, and there's no filtering, scoring, or Slack delivery.

Create a Google Alert for site:reddit.com "your keyword" and you'll get emails when Google indexes a match. Two-minute setup, zero cost. The catch: Google only alerts on what it indexes, so fresh threads take hours or days to appear, and most comments never get indexed at all. You'll catch the big threads that already rank on Google and miss the 20-minute-old post where someone is asking for a tool like yours. Useful as a supplement for authority threads, wrong as your only method.

F5Bot is a free service that emails you when your keywords appear in Reddit posts or comments (Hacker News too). For basic brand-name tracking on a $0 budget it's the right answer, and alerts usually arrive within minutes. The limits show up when you go beyond exact brand names: every match becomes an email with no relevance ranking on the free tier, so a keyword like "marketing" means 50 emails a day. Slack delivery and smarter filtering are gated to its paid tiers, and there's no way to tell a buying-intent thread from a passing mention.