Hacker News Keyword Monitor — Track Brand Mentions, Leads & Competitors on Hacker News

Know the same day when Hacker News talks about your product, your competitor, or the problem you solve. Hacker News Keyword Monitor is a no-code hacker news keyword monitor and HN mention tracker that watches any keyword, brand name, or phrase across Hacker News stories and comments and delivers fresh items as clean, structured data. No API keys. No code. Just enter your keywords, hit run (or schedule it daily), and get every new mention in a spreadsheet-ready table.

Whether you're doing Hacker News lead generation, brand monitoring, or competitor research, this hacker news scraper turns the HN firehose into an actionable daily feed — powered by the official, free Hacker News Search API.

What you get

Every matching story or comment is returned as a structured row. Example output:

keyword	type	title	author	points	createdAt	hnUrl
asana alternative	story	Show HN: a lightweight Asana alternative for small teams	founder1	128	2026-06-12T08:14:03Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111
project management tool	comment	(on) Ask HN: what PM tool do you use?	dev_jane	0	2026-06-12T06:41:55Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=222
notion	story	Notion vs the world: a teardown	writer7	88	2026-06-11T19:02:10Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333

Each item in the dataset follows this exact JSON schema:

{
  "keyword": "asana alternative",
  "source": "hackernews",
  "type": "comment",
  "objectId": "48508487",
  "title": "Ask HN: best lightweight Asana alternative?",
  "snippet": "Honestly the best alternative I've found is … (first 300 chars, HTML-cleaned)…",
  "author": "dev_jane",
  "points": 0,
  "numComments": 0,
  "createdAt": "2026-06-12T08:14:03Z",
  "url": "https://example.com/article-or-hn-item",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508487",
  "matchedIn": "body"
}

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS, or pull it via the Apify API.

Use cases

• Lead generation — catch people on HN actively asking for a tool like yours ("Ask HN: alternative to X?", "anyone using Y?") in stories and comments, and reach out while the thread is warm.
• Brand monitoring — track every mention of your company or product so you can reply to questions, complaints, and praise before they snowball.
• Competitor tracking — monitor competitor names to see what HN's high-intent, technical audience loves, hates, and asks for.
• Content & market research — discover the exact questions and pain points your audience posts about, and turn them into content, features, and launch ideas.

How to use

1. Enter your keywords — add the words, brand names, or phrases you want to watch.
2. Choose stories or stories + comments — flip on "Search comments too" to catch tool-recommendation threads (where most leads are).
3. Run it — or schedule it daily — run on demand, or set up an Apify Schedule so the monitor checks Hacker News every morning automatically.
4. Export or automate — download results as CSV/Excel/Google Sheets, or pipe them straight to Slack, email, a webhook, Make, or Zapier using Apify integrations.

Input parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
keywords	array of strings	required	Words or phrases to monitor. Each keyword is searched separately.
searchComments	boolean	false	Also search HN comments, not just stories.
timeRange	enum	day	How far back to search: hour, day, week, month, year, all.
sort	enum	new	Result order: new, relevance, or top (most points).
maxResultsPerKeyword	integer	50	Max items collected per keyword (1–1000).
proxyConfiguration	proxy	off	Optional. The HN API is open, so no proxy is needed.

Scheduling & integrations

This actor is built to run daily on autopilot.

• Daily scheduling — open the actor in Apify Console → Schedules → create a schedule (e.g. every day at 08:00) with your saved input. Each morning you'll get a fresh dataset of overnight Hacker News mentions.
• Google Sheets — connect the Apify → Google Sheets integration to append every run's results to a live spreadsheet.
• Slack / email / webhooks — get pinged the moment a run finishes (or only when it finds new mentions) via Apify's Slack, email, and webhook integrations.
• Make & Zapier — trigger thousands of downstream apps: add leads to your CRM, create tasks, post to a channel, or kick off an outreach sequence.

Because results arrive as structured JSON, you can wire Hacker News mentions into virtually any workflow without writing code.

Pricing

This actor uses Apify's simple pay-per-event pricing:

• a small fixed fee each time the actor starts a run, plus
• a small fee per result (per HN story or comment) it finds.

That means you only pay for what you actually get. A typical daily monitoring run on a handful of keywords finds a few dozen items and costs just a few cents. If a run finds nothing, it writes a tiny "no results" marker so you can confirm it ran — at near-zero cost (only the start fee, no per-result charges).

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. This actor uses the official, free Hacker News Search API (powered by Algolia) — no keys, no login, no setup. Just enter keywords and run.

How fresh is the data? As fresh as Hacker News itself. With sort = new and timeRange = day, you get stories and comments from the last 24 hours, ordered newest-first — ideal for a daily schedule. Run it hourly with timeRange = hour for near-real-time alerts.

Does it search comments? Yes — flip on "Search comments too". Comments are where most "anyone know a tool like X?" recommendations live, so they're gold for lead generation. By default the actor searches stories only.

What if a run finds nothing? The actor writes a single informational item per keyword ({"info": "no_results", ...}) so your dataset is never empty and you can confirm the monitor ran successfully. Runs that find nothing cost almost nothing, since there are no per-result charges.

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