Brand & Keyword Mention Aggregator

Find every Hacker News mention of your brand, product, or keyword in the last N days. No API key required. Free.

Exact-phrase matching — no false positives from substring matches.

⚠️ Reddit is currently HN-only on Apify cloud. Reddit blocks Apify's datacenter IPs. To include Reddit results, run this actor with residential proxies enabled in the run settings (adds ~$0.0004 per run). HN works without proxies.

What it does

For each keyword you provide:

1. Queries Hacker News (via Algolia's official search API) for exact-phrase matches in the last N days
2. Queries Reddit's public search.json for the same exact phrase (requires residential proxies on Apify cloud)
3. Dedupes by permalink
4. Returns a flat dataset of mentions with author, score, snippet, and link

Use cases

• Founders monitoring brand mentions (you launched on HN — who's talking about you?)
• PR / marketing teams tracking competitor or category mentions
• Devs monitoring their open-source project's name across communities
• Hiring spotting people mentioning your stack ("we just shipped X in next.js")
• Customer research surfacing real user feedback for a product

Input

{
  "keywords": ["next.js", "supabase"],
  "days": 7,
  "maxPerKeyword": 30
}

Field	Type	Description
keywords	string[]	One or more exact phrases to track
days	integer	Look back this many days (default 7, max 90)
maxPerKeyword	integer	Cap per keyword per source (default 30, max 100)

Output (example, query="next.js")

{
  "source": "hackernews",
  "keyword": "next.js",
  "title": "Arrow Flight vs. JSON in Next.js: Benchmarking Python and Go",
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077301",
  "permalink": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077301",
  "snippet": "...",
  "author": "keynha",
  "ts": 1778414403393,
  "score": 12,
  "numComments": 4
}

Performance

• 2 keywords × 7 days: 5.5s, $0.0012, ~26 unique mentions

Pricing

Free. You pay only Apify's compute (~$0.001 per run).

FAQ

Why exact-phrase matching? Without it, searching "cosmiclan" matches user "cosmicgadget" (substring). We wrap your keyword in quotes before passing it to the underlying search APIs. Zero false positives.

Why does Reddit return 0 results on Apify cloud? Reddit's anti-bot detection blocks Apify's datacenter IPs. Two options:

1. Enable residential proxies in the run settings (adds ~$0.0004 per run)
2. Run this actor locally where Reddit doesn't block you (the source is on GitHub)

Can I add Twitter / X / LinkedIn? Those platforms aggressively block scraping and require paid API access. Open a feature request and we'll plug in the appropriate paid actor.

How often should I run this? Daily for active monitoring. Apify's free tier covers ~3,000 daily runs/month.

Author

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