Sentiment & insights · Competitor monitoring
Competitor monitoring tool and software that tracks every rival mention
The short answer
A competitor monitoring tool tracks what people say about your rivals across every public channel, so you can compare mention volume, sentiment and share of voice against your own brand. EyeOut watches your competitors across Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts twice an hour, scores each mention for sentiment, and alerts you when a competitor spikes or a campaign lands. It is self-serve, from $39 per month billed yearly, with no annual lock-in.
Watching your own brand is only half the picture. A competitor monitoring tool shows you what the market is saying about your rivals too, and EyeOut tracks your competitors across Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts alongside your own brand.
You see their mention volume, their sentiment, the complaints customers raise about them, and your share of voice against them over time. When a competitor has a spike, a launch, or a crisis, you get an alert first, so you can react or capitalize. It is self-serve and live, turning rival monitoring into a steady competitive edge. Start watching your competitors today.
Start watching to see mentions from news, Reddit, Mastodon and forums with sentiment.
Sentiment
Share of voice
Negative mention spike detected
on Reddit and forums, up 320% vs baseline. Severity: High.
Suggested first move: review the batch threads and prepare a holding response before it spreads to news.
Interactive demo on a representative mention set. Your own workspace scans every source twice an hour.
Watch your own brand across news, Reddit and forums and get the alert when something spikes.
Every 30 minutes across Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts. AI sentiment, spike and crisis alerts.
Add a brand · watch news, Reddit and forums · read sentiment · catch the spike
Self-serve no sales call
Cancel anytime no annual lock-in
Why it works
What your team gets with competitor monitoring
Side-by-side view
Your brand and your competitors are tracked on the same channels, so volume, sentiment and share of voice compare directly.
Find their weak spots
See the recurring complaints customers raise about rivals, so you can position against real gaps rather than guesses.
React to their moves
A competitor launch, spike or crisis triggers an alert first, so you can respond or capitalize while it still matters.
What it handles
Watched, read and flagged twice an hour
EyeOut watches Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and podcasts for your brand, scores each mention for sentiment, rolls it up into a daily digest and share of voice, and alerts you when a real spike begins.
- Tracks competitor mentions across every channel
- Compares sentiment and share of voice directly
- Surfaces recurring complaints about rivals
- Alerts you to competitor spikes and launches
- Shows where you are winning or losing the conversation
Why EyeOut
One tool for cross-channel brand monitoring
Not a social-only listener and not a sales-gated enterprise platform. Watch news, Reddit, forums and podcasts, read the sentiment, track share of voice and catch the spike, in one place, self-serve.
Watches news, Reddit and forums
Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts in one feed, including the blind spots most affordable tools skip.
Catches the spike
AI baselines your normal volume and sentiment, then alerts on a real anomaly with a severity and a suggested first move, twice an hour.
Reads it for you
Sentiment, emotion, theme clustering and a plain-English daily digest, so you act on the story instead of scrolling a firehose.
Competitor monitoring, explained
What competitor monitoring tells you that a competitor report does not
The questions teams ask before they start tracking rivals, answered directly.
Most competitive intelligence work happens in retrospect. Someone builds a deck once a quarter comparing feature sets and pricing pages, everyone reads it, and it describes a state of the world that was true a month ago. It is useful for planning and nearly useless for the decisions that come up weekly: whether a rival's launch is actually landing, whether their customers are unhappy about something you solve, whether the roundup that ranks for your category still lists you second.
Continuous monitoring answers a different class of question because it watches the conversation rather than the artifacts. A competitor's pricing page tells you what they charge. Their customers on Reddit tell you whether people think it is worth it, which is the input that actually moves your positioning. The two most valuable things monitoring surfaces are complaint themes, the recurring frustrations a rival's users voice in public, and switching moments, the posts where someone says they are evaluating alternatives. Neither appears in a quarterly deck, and both have a short window where acting on them matters.
Quarterly competitor research vs continuous monitoring with EyeOut
| What you want to know | Quarterly research | EyeOut |
|---|---|---|
| Feature and pricing changes | Accurate at the time of writing | Surfaced when announcements and coverage appear |
| Why their customers are unhappy | Anecdotal, if captured at all | Complaint themes clustered from public mentions |
| Switching signals | Missed entirely | Posts evaluating alternatives surfaced as they appear |
| Campaign impact | Judged after the fact | Mention volume and sentiment tracked as it moves |
| Share of the conversation | A snapshot number | Tracked over time, weighted by sentiment |
| Effort | Days of analyst time per cycle | Set the competitor set once, read the feed |
How do you monitor your competitors online?
Name your competitors and their main products as tracked terms, then watch every public channel for them continuously rather than checking sites periodically. Score each mention for sentiment and group recurring themes, so their customers' complaints and any switching intent surface as patterns instead of scattered posts you happen to read.
What is a competitor monitoring tool?
It is software that tracks public mentions of your rivals across Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts, and compares them to your own. The point is not the mention count. It is seeing sentiment, complaint themes and share of voice side by side, so you know where you are gaining and where you are being chosen against.
Is competitor monitoring legal?
Monitoring publicly available content about competitors is standard business practice and entirely legal. You are reading what people posted in public. The lines are private or proprietary data, misrepresenting yourself to obtain access, and creating fake accounts. Reputable tools work only with publicly visible content.
How many competitors should you track?
Usually three to five, the ones that genuinely appear on the same shortlists as you. Tracking more dilutes attention and produces a feed nobody reads. Include one adjacent player you are starting to lose deals to, because the competitor that hurts you next is rarely the one you have watched longest.
Can you get alerts when a competitor is mentioned?
Yes, and the setting that matters is what triggers the alert. Alerting on every mention produces noise you will mute within a week. Alerting on anomalies, a competitor spiking past their normal volume or their sentiment shifting sharply, tells you something happened and is worth interrupting your day for.
Good questions
Questions about competitor monitoring
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Add your brand and EyeOut watches news, Reddit, forums and podcasts twice an hour, reads the sentiment, tracks share of voice, and warns you when a spike begins. Self-serve, cancel anytime.
Twice-an-hour across Google News, Reddit, Mastodon, Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts · AI sentiment · spike and crisis alerts