Track your brand mentions with OpenClaw

How it works

You send the brand monitor prompt, and the agent sets up the log and the daily search that fills it:

• It creates a CSV in its workspace with the date it found each mention, the source, the author, the URL, a short quote, and the sentiment.
• Once every 24 hours it searches the web for fresh mentions of whatever you asked it to watch.
• It checks each result's URL against the rows already in the file and adds one only for mentions it has not seen before.
• It messages you the new mentions it found, or a quick note on a quiet day when there were none.

That dedupe step is what a raw alert feed never does, so the spreadsheet stays a clean list of distinct mentions instead of the same three links every morning. You can pause or change the daily search on the Automations page in your Operator dashboard.

The key insight is that brand monitoring is a read, act, write loop: the agent reads the web for your terms, writes new rows into the CSV, and sends you a summary in chat. You stay on judgment calls like whether a mention matters or needs a response.

Keeping track of who is talking about you online sounds simple until you try to do it by hand. You run the same searches every morning, but you forget on busy days, you lose track of which links you have already seen, and three weeks later you cannot remember whether that Reddit thread was new or something you read back in March. The paid monitoring tools exist because the manual version does not hold up over time.

Brand24 starts at $249 a month on monthly billing ($199 on annual), and Mention now offers a single Company plan at $599 a month billed annually for new customers after retiring its cheaper self serve tiers. Google Alerts is the free option most people reach for first, and it is useful for news and blogs, but it emails you a stream of links and stops there. Nothing gets logged, nothing gets deduplicated, and there is no record you can sort, filter, or hand to someone else.

Your Operator.io agent can take the whole loop: the search, the log, the dedupe, and the daily check in. You send it one prompt, and it stands up a spreadsheet of mentions plus an automation that goes looking for new ones every day.

The prompt

This is the instruction the agent acts on:

Be my brand monitor. Create a spreadsheet in your workspace, a CSV with columns
for date found, source, author, URL, quote, and sentiment. Once a day, search
the web for new mentions of my brand and, for each result, check its URL against
the rows already in the file so you never log the same mention twice, then add a
row for anything new. Set up an automation that runs this every 24 hours and
messages me here with the new mentions it found, or a quick note when there were
none. Before you start, ask me my brand name and any handles, product names, or
people I want tracked, which terms should count as a real mention versus noise,
and what time of day you should run the check.

You can send this exact prompt to your agent from the prompts library instead of copying it out.

Using it day to day

After setup, the agent comes to you. At the time you picked, it runs the search, writes any new mentions into the CSV, and sends you a short rundown in your channel: who mentioned you, where, and how it read the sentiment. On a quiet day it tells you there was nothing new, so you are not left wondering whether the job ran at all.

Everything you set at the start is something you can change by asking. Tell it to add a competitor's name to the watch list, drop a term that keeps pulling in noise, switch the check to twice a day, or summarize the week's mentions for you every Friday, and it adjusts the search and the automation to match. When you want to read the raw data, ask it to send you the CSV or to pull every negative mention from the last month, and it works straight from the file it has been keeping.

Where mentions show up

Before you automate anything, it helps to know where brand conversations happen, because no single source sees all of them. Reddit and the open web carry the bulk of what is publicly searchable: forum threads, blog posts, news, and comparison articles. Reddit is worth special attention, since a thread from a year ago still ranks in Google and keeps pulling in readers who are deciding whether to buy.

The other half is review sites, where opinions form in real time: G2 for software, Capterra for SaaS reviews, Trustpilot for consumer brands, and Glassdoor if you care how you read as an employer.

A lot of this you can cover by hand for nothing, though it means stitching a few tools together. Google Alerts is the free starting point for news and blogs, but it is weaker than people expect on Reddit and social, because it only surfaces what Google has indexed and many Reddit comments never get there. F5Bot covers that gap, watching Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters for your terms and emailing you the moment one shows up.

Reddit will also hand you a feed for any search of its own: append .rss to a search URL, like reddit.com/search.rss?q=your+brand&sort=new, and drop it into a reader. For a one off check, a Google search operator such as site:reddit.com "your brand" pulls mentions out of a single site.

The closed platforms, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok, are the hard part, since they limit what any outside tool can see. X's API charges per read for third party monitoring, and LinkedIn restricts most content to logged in users. The agent searches what is publicly indexed through OpenClaw's web search tool and logs it in one place. For full coverage of closed platforms, dedicated tools like Brand24 or Mention pay for API access and proprietary crawlers that justify their monthly price for teams tracking crisis response in real time.

The deeper problem with the manual patchwork is that every piece is its own separate inbox: nothing dedupes across them, and nothing keeps a record you can sort three months from now. Pulling it into one clean log is the tedious part, and the part worth handing off.

What enterprise tools add

Brand monitoring is a real category, what the industry calls media monitoring and social listening. Enterprise platforms earn their price for large teams tracking millions of mentions across dozens of languages with real time alerts, influencer scoring, and crisis dashboards.

Brand24's Individual plan updates every 12 hours; real time monitoring starts on the Team plan at $349 a month. Mention's Company plan at $599 a month includes real time social and web monitoring, Boolean search, historical data, and team collaboration. Both cover sources the agent cannot reach without their proprietary indexes, especially authenticated social feeds and long historical archives.

Most individuals and small teams do not need that depth. They need to know when their name comes up, in a place they can search later, without paying a few hundred dollars a month. The agent's CSV gives you a searchable record you own, dedupes before adding rows, and runs on the OpenClaw instance you already have through Operator.

Setting up effective watch terms

When the agent asks which terms to track, give it your brand name, product names, common misspellings, and any public handles on X or Reddit. Also name terms that should count as noise: a generic word that happens to match your brand, a city with the same name, or a larger company whose name contains yours. The agent filters search results against those rules before adding rows.

Adding a competitor's name to the watch list lets you see when they get mentioned alongside you in comparison threads, which is often where purchase decisions happen. You can ask the agent to tag those rows with a separate column or filter them in summaries.

Good to know

Google Alerts will tell you something happened and then lose track of it. The agent keeps the record in a CSV you can come back to whenever you want, with deduplication so you are not rereading the same link every morning. Sentiment tagging is the agent's read on tone, useful for sorting, not a formal NLP score from a dedicated analytics platform.

To set it up, open the prompts library and send the brand monitor prompt to your agent. It asks which names and terms to watch, then it searches each day and reports new mentions in the channel you already use.