A Google Alert on your product's name is the obvious first step at launch, and it will miss some Reddit threads about your product. That follows from how the tool works. The options quoted below are the ones on google.com/alerts as of October 23, 2026. I make Loudship, which comes up at the end.
An alert is a Google search that runs by itself
Google describes the product in one line: you get emails "when new results for a topic show up in Google Search". So an alert can only send what Google Search would show you, and only once it shows up there. For a Reddit thread, that means three steps have to happen first: Google crawls the page, indexes it, and, under the default setting "Only the best results", ranks it high enough to pass the filter.
Each step costs time, and some threads never complete them. A thread is one page, so the replies under it are not separate results: a new comment on a two-week-old thread, which is often where someone asks for a recommendation, does not create anything new for the alert to send. That suits news and blogs, where a new article is a new page. Reddit works the other way.
Setting it up so it misses less
- Narrow the query to Reddit. Alerts take the same query as Google Search:
"your product" site:reddit.comkeeps the alert on Reddit threads only. - Choose "All results" under How many. "Only the best results" is the default, and it filters what you receive by Google's own ranking.
- Choose "As-it-happens" under How often, so a thread arrives the day Google finds it instead of in a weekly batch.
- Leave Sources on "Automatic". "Discussions" sounds like the right choice for Reddit, but Google does not say what it includes: run it next to an Automatic alert for a week before relying on it.
- Add a second alert on the problem, not the brand. People asking for a tool rarely know your name. A quoted phrase such as
"alternative to" "your competitor" site:reddit.comfinds some of them, late.
The free Reddit alerts that stop on November 13
Until now, the other free way to watch Reddit was its RSS feeds: a Reddit search turned into a feed, piped into a feed reader, IFTTT or Zapier. On September 30, 2026, Reddit announced that RSS support ends on November 13, and that there is no replacement for feeds used outside the communities you moderate (TechCrunch). Public API access ends by March 2027, and developers who have not registered their apps by January 12 lose it sooner.
Google Alerts is not affected by the feed shutdown, because it never used the feeds. Every homemade RSS alert is. If a tool you rely on reads Reddit, it is worth asking where its data comes from now, and what happens when that stops. For Loudship the answer is a licensed web-search index whose terms allow storing results, for Reddit, and the official open APIs of Hacker News and Bluesky. Nothing is scraped, and nothing depends on Reddit's feeds or public API.
| Criterion | Google Alerts | Loudship |
|---|---|---|
| What it watches | New Google Search results for your query: web, news, blogs, discussions, video, books, finance | Reddit, Hacker News and Bluesky threads, read every night |
| How Reddit gets in | Once Google has crawled and indexed the thread | Through a licensed web-search index; Hacker News and Bluesky through their official APIs |
| Who decides what you see | Google's ranking: "Only the best results" by default, or "All results" | A read of each thread: is the author asking for something like your product? |
| Timing | As it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week | One digest every morning |
| What arrives | Titles, snippets and links | Up to five threads, each with a draft reply from your product memory |
| Price | Free with a Google account | $29 a month after a free first digest |
What a search index can and cannot tell you
Loudship also starts from a search index for Reddit, so it shares part of the timing problem: a thread has to be indexed before anyone can read it. What changes is the step after. Google Alerts sends a link and a snippet ranked by Google. Loudship reads the whole thread, decides whether the author is asking for something your product does, and keeps up to five a day, each with a reply drafted from facts you approved about your product. You read it, edit it and post it yourself, from your own account. The radar page shows one of those mornings.
If you want faster Reddit alerts for free before deciding, F5Bot is the first thing to try. If you are replying to threads already, how to promote your product on Reddit without getting banned covers the part no alert helps with.