Building a Brand Monitoring System That Alerts You in Real Time

Your brand is being talked about right now. A journalist published a piece. A Reddit thread went sideways. A competitor mentioned you in a LinkedIn post. A review hit G2.

You’ll probably find out about it hours later — or not at all.

Brand monitoring tools like Mention, Brand24, and Brandwatch cost $50–$500/month, often require annual contracts, and cover sources they’ve pre-selected. Seek API workers let you build a custom monitoring stack that covers exactly the sources you care about, at a fraction of the cost.

What to monitor

A complete brand monitoring system watches for your name (and variations) across:

You don’t need to monitor all of them at once. Start with the 2–3 where your audience lives.

Setting up Google News monitoring

curl -X POST https://api.seek-api.com/v1/workers/google-news/jobs \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "\"SeekAPI\" OR \"Seek API\"", "since": "24h"}'

Response:

{
  "articles": [
    {
      "title": "SeekAPI raises seed round to expand API worker marketplace",
      "source": "TechCrunch",
      "url": "https://techcrunch.com/...",
      "publishedAt": "2026-03-05T09:12:00Z",
      "snippet": "The platform allows developers to publish workers..."
    }
  ]
}

Reddit monitoring

Reddit is where honest opinions live. Early negative sentiment on Reddit often predicts larger reputation issues.

POST /v1/workers/reddit-search/jobs
{
  "query": "seekapi OR \"seek api\"",
  "subreddits": ["SaaS", "webdev", "sideprojects", "entrepreneur"],
  "sort": "new",
  "limit": 20
}

Combined result includes post title, score, comment count, and direct link. Set a threshold: if a post gets 10+ upvotes, send an alert immediately.

The monitoring pipeline in Node.js

import fetch from 'node-fetch';
import Cron from 'node-cron';

const BRAND_TERMS = ['"SeekAPI"', '"Seek API"', '"seekapi.io"'];
const WORKERS = ['google-news', 'reddit-search', 'twitter-search'];
const SEEN_IDS = new Set(); // persist to Redis or DB in production

async function runMonitoringCycle() {
  const allResults = [];

  for (const worker of WORKERS) {
    const job = await startJob(worker, { query: BRAND_TERMS.join(' OR '), since: '4h' });
    const result = await waitForJob(job.job_uuid);
    allResults.push(...(result.articles || result.posts || result.tweets || []));
  }

  const newItems = allResults.filter(item => !SEEN_IDS.has(item.id));
  
  for (const item of newItems) {
    SEEN_IDS.add(item.id);
    const sentiment = analyzeSentiment(item.text || item.title);
    
    if (sentiment.score < 0.3 || item.score > 50) {
      await sendSlackAlert(item, sentiment);
    }
  }
}

async function sendSlackAlert(item, sentiment) {
  const emoji = sentiment.score < 0.3 ? '🚨' : '📢';
  await fetch(process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      text: `${emoji} *Brand mention detected*\n*Source:* ${item.source}\n*Title:* ${item.title}\n*Sentiment:* ${sentiment.label}\n<${item.url}|View →>`
    })
  });
}

// Every 4 hours
Cron.schedule('0 */4 * * *', runMonitoringCycle);

Review site monitoring

G2 and Capterra reviews affect your search rankings and conversion rates. New 1-star reviews need fast responses — 24h ideally, 48h maximum.

POST /v1/workers/g2-reviews/jobs
{ "productSlug": "seekapi", "since": "7d", "minRating": 1, "maxRating": 5 }

Or track competitor reviews to understand their weaknesses:

POST /v1/workers/g2-reviews/jobs
{ "productSlug": "competitor-product", "since": "30d", "minRating": 1, "maxRating": 2 }

Two-star reviews for your competitors are your sales talking points.

HackerNews: the developer pulse

If you’re a dev tools company, HackerNews mentions carry disproportionate weight. A “Show HN” for your product or a “Why X is terrible” thread can drive thousands of signups or create lasting reputation damage.

Use the HN search worker with your brand name, run it hourly. For high-scoring posts (>50 points), trigger an immediate alert — those are often worth responding to within minutes.

Cost

Selling you this as a cost alternative is almost too easy. A Brand24 subscription at the entry tier costs $69/month. This setup on Seek API: 6 monitoring workers, 6 checks/day = ~180 API calls/day = ~$0.18/day = ~$5.40/month.

And you control exactly which sources run and how often.