Notes on social listening, buyer intent, and going to market in public.
Nine of twelve listening tools ship an MCP server; none has written about it. Context rent, result caps, and the one thing MCP cannot do.
Reddit lets you report items, not campaigns — there is no brand escalation channel and no published SLA. And mass-reporting a competitor is itself bannable.
Every statistic about Reddit and AI search is true, and most are misread. What the numbers measure, and what it takes to get named by an assistant.
The 9:1 rule is in no enforceable Reddit policy. What the spam rule says, what Reddit permits, and why the FTC is stricter than Reddit.
Most competitive monitoring watches the competitor. The higher-value signal is the decision — and people making it usually name no vendor at all.
Reddit's robots.txt disallows every crawler, Alerts has no Reddit option, and page-level indexing cannot see comment-level mentions. Three structural gaps.
GummySearch is closing after failing to reach a commercial Reddit licence. What the founder actually said, and which circulating numbers are invented.
F5Bot is free, has run since 2017, and is genuinely good. Here is the exact line where people outgrow it, with its current tiers read from its own pricing page.
Ten social listening tools, three free tiers, and an API that mostly costs extra. Why we designed the agent surface first and put it on the free plan.
The first keyword everyone adds is the weakest one they will ever have. How brand-name matching fails, and a five-keyword set with only one brand term.
Why we built a listening tool that judges every mention instead of just counting them, and what the first release does.