Brand Monitoring: Tools & Guide for 2026

Research by SE Ranking shows that brands receiving mentions on Quora and Reddit significantly increase their chances of being cited in ChatGPT.

In fact:

• Minimal Quora presence (up to 33 mentions) results in 1.7 citations.
• Minimal Reddit presence (up to 131 mentions) results in 1.8 citations.
• Brands with millions of mentions on Quora and Reddit have about 4 times higher chances of being cited than those with little activity.

Quick summary:

What is brand monitoring?
Brand monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing all public mentions of your brand across the internet. The main goal is to understand, manage, and influence how your brand is perceived.

Brand monitoring + AI brand visibility tracking = the whole brand presence.
While classic brand monitoring tools track what people say about your brand online, AI brand visibility tracking tools track what ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, etc., say when asked about your brand, industry, or products.

2026 is gonna be a year of brand mentions.
Even a little activity on Quora, Reddit, Medium, or LinkedIn can improve your brand performance in both Google and LLMs. Increasing the number of brand mentions will be a crucial goal for many marketing teams in 2026.

The best brand monitoring tools for 2026:

You can monitor your brand in various ways depending on your needs. That’s why I categorized the tools. Hope you’ll find it helpful.

Let’s dive in!

Specialized brand monitoring tools

Let’s start by examining software where monitoring is the primary feature. These tools focus on delivering high-value data, developing features, and increasing the number of monitored sources.

01 Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening and media monitoring tool that tracks and analyzes mentions (or any keywords) in real-time across the internet.

The tool tracks mentions of your brand name, products, hashtags, and competitors across over 25 million online sources, including:

• Social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Telegram, Bluesky
• Review sites: TripAdvisor, Yelp, Booking, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot
• Blogs
• Video platforms
• Podcasts
• Discussion forums
• Newsletters
• Online news sources
• All other publicly available mentions on the web

Key features:

• Real-time monitoring – Tracks mentions of your brand across social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and more, as they happen.
• AI-powered sentiment analysis – Automatically categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral and tracks emotions.
• AI Features (Insights & Brand Assistant) – AI interprets brand data to surface trends, threats, and opportunities, and answers questions like “What’s hurting our reputation?”
• Real-time alerts – Instant notifications when there’s a spike in mentions or a sudden change in sentiment.
• Analytics – Detailed metrics like mention volume, sentiment trends, top sources, share of voice, reach, and more.
• Customizable reports – Automatically generated PDF, Excel, or online reports tailored to your needs.
• Influencer identification – Detects who is talking about your brand and ranks them by influence.

In summary, you can use Brand24 to:

• Monitor brand mentions and reputation in real time.
• Detect PR crises or negative feedback early and respond fast.
• Track key metrics, including volume of mentions, share of voice, reach, brand sentiment, AVE, social interactions, and Presence Score.
• Understand customer sentiment, feedback, and pain points.
• Track and compare competitors or industry mentions.
• Identify influencers discussing your brand.
• Generate reports and data-driven insights for marketing, PR, product, and leadership teams.

02 Brandmentions

Brandmentions is an affordable social listening tool for small and medium-sized companies.

The tool monitors:

• Social platforms: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Bluesky
• News sites
• Blogs
• Forums
• Review sites
• General web
• Video pages

Key features:

• Web & social monitoring – Tracks mentions across social media, news, blogs, forums, reviews, and the wider web.
• Real-time alerts – Notify you instantly when your brand or keywords are mentioned.
• Sentiment analysis – Identifies positive, negative, and neutral mentions (with emotion-level detail).
• Competitor tracking – Monitors competitors and industry keywords.
• Reporting – Customizable reports, filters, and analytics.
• Trend & historical analysis – Tracks how mentions and sentiment change over time.
• Influencer identification – Identifies key voices discussing your brand.

In summary, you can use Brandmentions to:

• Get alerts so you can respond quickly to praise, complaints, or crises.
• Track mentions of your brand, products, or competitors.
• Monitor reputation, public sentiment, and customer feedback.
• Detect trends and changes in conversation over time.
• Compare yourself with competitors.
• Find influencers or key voices talking about your brand.

All-in-one comprehensive solutions

These tools combine monitoring, engagement, publishing, and analytics in one platform. Using them can save you time. On the other hand, they are more expensive, and monitoring can be an extra paid add-on.

03 Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a leading digital consumer intelligence and social media management platform with a monitoring feature.

It is, however, one of the most expensive brand monitoring tools on the market.

The tool monitors:

• Major social networks: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky
• Blogs
• News sites
• Forums and communities
• Review sites and public review platforms

Key features:

• Extensive source coverage – Monitors over 100 million sources, including major social media platforms, news sites, blogs, and review sites.
• Sentiment analysis– Uses AI to determine the tone (positive, negative, neutral) of mentions and detect sarcasm or specific product feedback.
• Real-time alerts – Provides instant notifications for sudden changes in conversation volume or sentiment, aiding swift reputation management.
• Audience and influencer analysis – Identifies key audience demographics and top industry influencers.
• Competitor benchmarking – Allows tracking and comparison of brand performance against competitors.
• Image and video recognition – Identifies logos within images and videos for visual brand exposure tracking.
• Customizable reporting – Offers detailed, shareable reports and interactive dashboards.

In summary, you can use Brandwatch to:

• Create custom reports for PR, marketing, and leadership teams
• Monitor your brand across social media, news, blogs, forums, and the wider web.
• Analyze sentiment and emotions behind conversations.
• Detect crises early through real-time alerts and mention spikes.
• Identify trends, topics, and emerging issues in your industry.
• Discover influencers and key voices driving conversations.
• Understand your audience through demographic and behavioral insights.
• Manage and publish social media content (with its social management suite)

Check: Brandwatch Alternatives

04 Meltwater

Meltwater is a global media intelligence software with social listening and social media management features.

The tool monitors:

• Social media: Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitch, Pinterest
• Online news
• Blogs
• Forums & communities
• Review sites
• Podcasts
• TV & radio
• Print media (newspapers, magazines)

Key features:

• Comprehensive coverage – Tracks brand mentions across 270,000+ news sources, all major social platforms, blogs, forums, review sites, podcasts, and print/broadcast media.
• Real-Time alerts – Instant notifications for important mentions or emerging issues.
• Sentiment analysis – AI identifies positive, negative, or neutral conversations to show how public perception evolves.
• Competitor analysis – Monitors competitor mentions to help benchmark performance and spot trends.
• AI-powered insights – Surfaces key themes, influencers, and emerging topics from large data sets.
• Reputation management – Centralizes reviews and mentions to help protect and manage brand image.
• Social media management – Supports publishing, scheduling, engagement, and performance tracking across major social channels.

You can use Meltwater to:

• Analyze PR, marketing, and brand performance.
• Uncover consumer needs, identify trends, and inform product development.
• Monitor competitor coverage, campaigns, and launches
• Access PR databases, build media lists, send press releases, and manage outreach.
• Plan, schedule, and publish across multiple social platforms.
• Analyze PR, marketing, and brand performance.

Check: Meltwater Alternatives

Brand monitoring tools for AI visibility

The appearance of ChatGPT revolutionized the way users search for brands. That’s why we should also monitor AI brand visibility right now. Let’s check the tools that work great for that.

05 Chatbeat

Chatbeat is a brand monitoring tool that shows how your brand (or product, company, etc.) appears in answers generated by AI chatbots and large-language models (LLMs).

The tool monitors:

• ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot, and Google AI Overview.

Key features:

• AI visibility tracking – Monitors major AI models to see if, how often, and in what context a brand appears in their generated responses to user prompts (questions).
• Brand score and average position – The tool provides metrics to indicate visibility and average ranking within AI answers, allowing companies to measure their exposure.
• Prompt suggestions – Identify valuable prompts where your brand should be visible, but isn’t.
• Competitive analysis – Track how competitors are mentioned by AI chatbots, providing insights into their share of voice in the generative AI space.

You can use Chatbeat to:

• See exactly how often your brand, products, or key industry topics appear in AI-generated answers.
• Track brand score, average position, share of voice, and brand rankings.
• Monitor whether AI is accurately mentioning new features and products.
• Find key sources that deliver visibility.

06 Semrush

Semrush is a powerful SEO tool that offers the AI Visibility Toolkit, which helps you understand how your brand, company, and products perform in AI searches.

The tool monitors:

• ChatGPT, AI Overview, AI Mode, and other AI platforms.

Key features:

• AI visibility score and benchmark – Measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers and compares it to competitors.
• Competitor benchmarking – Shows how your AI visibility, mentions, and citations stack up against rivals.
• Prompt research – Finds user prompts, trending topics, and AI-driven questions to guide content strategy.
• Prompt tracking – Monitors your brand’s visibility for selected prompts over time to measure performance.
• Gap analysis – Identifies prompts or topics where competitors are mentioned but you aren’t, revealing content opportunities.

You can use Semrush to:

• Monitor the overall SEO and AI performance as well as brand health.
• Discover new prompts and topics that users ask AI.
• Report your brand visibility and performance.
• Manage your social media effectively.

Free and basic option

Free tools offer very basic monitoring with limited functionalities. For broader, more accurate coverage and analysis, you need to use paid tools.

07 Google alerts

Google Alerts is a completely free tool that sends email notifications with no advanced analytics. Useful for basic monitoring.

The tool monitors:

• News websites,
• Blogs
• Forums and discussion boards
• General web pages indexed by Google
• Important: It does not monitor most social media platforms

Key features of Google Alerts:

• Basic online monitoring
• Email notifications for new results on chosen keywords
• Simple filters by region, language, and sources

Brand monitoring software comparison

Check the detailed comparison of the best brand monitoring tools.

Tool	Coverage	Key Features	Pricing
Brand24	25M+ sources: social media, blogs, news, forums, newsletters, podcasts, review sites, video, etc.	Real-time monitoring, AI sentiment analysis, AI Insights & Brand Assistant, instant alerts, analytics (SOV, reach, AVE, sentiment trends), influencer analysis, custom reports	Plans start at $149/month
Brandmentions	Social media, blogs, news, forums, reviews, general web & video pages.	Web & social monitoring, real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, influencer identification, trend & historical analytics	Plans start at $79/month
Brandwatch	100M+ sources across social media, news, blogs, forums, reviews; broad web monitoring.	Deep consumer intelligence, advanced sentiment (sarcasm detection), image & video logo recognition, influencer & audience insights, competitor benchmarking, alerts, customizable dashboards, social media management	Custom pricing
Meltwater	270k+ news sources, social platforms, blogs, forums, reviews, podcasts, TV & radio, print	Comprehensive monitoring (online + offline media), real-time alerts, sentiment, competitor analysis, AI insights, PR CRM (media lists + outreach), social publishing & engagement	Custom pricing
Chatbeat	AI chatbots/LLMs: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, AI Overview	AI visibility tracking, brand score & average position in AI answers, competitor benchmarking, prompt suggestions	Plans start at $99/month
Semrush (AI Visibility Toolkit)	ChatGPT, AI Overview, AI Mode, plus SEO datasets	AI visibility score, competitor benchmarking, prompt research & tracking, gap analysis, content opportunity insights	Plans start at $199/month
Google Alerts	Google-indexed news, blogs, forums, general web (no social media)	Free email notifications, basic keyword tracking	Free

What is brand monitoring?

In short: Brand monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing all public mentions of your brand across the internet.

The core purpose: The primary purpose of brand monitoring is to understand, manage, and influence brand perception and reputation across various channels in real-time.

What are the key elements of online brand monitoring?

In 2026, a solid brand monitoring tool should offer:

• Competitor analysis – monitoring conversations about competitors to benchmark performance and identify market gaps.
• Mentions tracking – detecting whenever your brand is mentioned online (tagged or untagged).
• Broad platform coverage – including news websites, blogs, forums (Reddit, Quora, Medium), social media (Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Bluesky), review sites (TripAdvisor, Booking, Yelp, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot), podcasts and video platforms (YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, Soundcloud), and newsletters.
• LLM monitoring – tracking mentions across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity.
• Brand sentiment analysis – assessing whether those mentions are positive, neutral, or negative.
• Reach & engagement – measuring how many people saw or interacted with the mention.
• Influencer identification – spotting who is talking about your brand and how influential they are.
• Crisis prevention – getting alerted to negative buzz early to respond quickly.
• Insight generation – analyzing feedback to understand customer pain points.

Why is brand monitoring important?

Monitoring online mentions is a key part of managing a brand. It helps you measure PR and sales KPIs, understand customer sentiment, track competitors, and discover trends.

Brand and social media monitoring support you in:

• Boosting sales through influencer collaborations
• Measuring hashtag campaign performance
• Tracking competitors and industry activity
• Improving customer experience by catching negative comments early
• Analyzing sentiment around products or campaigns
• Learning more about your audience
• Conducting brand analysis and market research

Manually searching for mentions across blogs, forums, and social media is a time-consuming and unreliable process.

Brand monitoring tools simplify this process by collecting mentions and providing powerful analytics, allowing you to stay on top of conversations and trends.

What are the benefits of brand monitoring?

Evaluating PR effectiveness

Brand monitoring is especially useful when it comes to measuring the results of PR campaigns.

Brand monitoring measures:

• the reach of your branded or campaign-specific hashtag
• the social media reach of your posts
• the non-social media reach of your content
• how often your keyword is mentioned on different social media channels
• how people feel about your messaging
• what context are the keywords used in.

By keeping a close eye on all those metrics, you can easily assess the results of your public relations efforts.

Presenting hard numbers will help you defend the results of your work. You will know how your work contribute to overall business success and will know which areas need improvement.

Reputation management

Monitoring mentions about your brand can also help manage your online reputation.

People talk, and they often talk behind your back — on platforms you’re not active. Your job is to find all the comments and react appropriately.

That way you can spot crises before they escalate and protect your brand reputation.

Key component of successful crisis management is speedy reaction to all negative posts.

Media monitoring tools allow you to set up notifications for the most important mentions.

You can receive traditional notifications in three ways:

• Slack integration. Every time there’s new mention you’ll automatically receive a message on the chosen Slack channel
• Storm alerts. When there’s an unexpected rise in the volume of mentions, we’ll email you.
• In-app notifications. We offer an app both for Android and iOS devices.

Once you’re in the know of mentions regarding your brand, products, or service, you have to act.

The question remains — how?

How to react to positive mentions?

Let’s start with the nice things! Responding to positive mentions is the cherry on top of all your hard work!

It’s always good to acknowledge that someone said something nice about you.

Responding to positive remarks with an emoji or a simple “thank you” won’t take long, but will build a favourable brand reputation.

How to react to negative mentions?

The worst thing you can do with customer complaints is not to answer them at all. Ignoring customers’ complaints can damage your brand reputation, decrease revenue, and increase churn.

Does it sound scary? It should!

Contrary to what many business owners think, receiving a negative mention is not an end of the world.

You could even turn the tables around and make the unhappy client your brand ambassador!

The trick is to react quickly and efficiently.

Your customers will leave two types of complaints. They could mention a real problem you could solve. That’s the best type of complaint. Just take a look here:

The customer indicates what the problem is. By proactively working to resolve the issue, you can show your customers that you care about their well-being.

There are, however, different types of complaints. For example, here:

You can’t really do anything about this problem, as the issue is about how the customer feels about your products.

You can’t solve the problem, but you can certainly make the customer feel better!

Sometimes, just acknowledging their problem could help you manage your brand reputation and prevent the crisis from escalating.

The worst thing you can do is leave your customer hanging without any answer. Ignoring your customers could damage your brand reputation. Repairing the damage could be time-consuming. 

Competitor analysis

Brand monitoring is not only about tracking the mentions concerning your brand.

You can also closely monitor your competition!

Monitoring your competitors will give some valuable insights, for example:

• Learning from their mistakes. Your competitors might have tested some solutions that didn’t work for them. You can adjust the strategy to your needs!
• Benefiting from their errors. Monitoring the mentions around your competitors can help you spot opportunities to take over the conversations and promote your product.
• Establishing in which direction your competitors are planning to develop their business. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you should follow in their footsteps, but it will give you a general idea of where your business niche is progressing. You will be able to get one step ahead, by identifying emerging industry trends.

How do you technically track the mentions concerning your brand competitors?

Exactly the way you monitor mentions concerning your brand!

Create a project, but instead of including keywords related to your brand, put in everything that’s associated with your competitors — the name of their product, hashtags, review sites, etc.

Then you can easily compare your results to your competitors.

Influencer marketing

You can use the results of brand monitoring to choose the right influencers for your next campaign.

Influencers will endorse your product and make sure your potential clients get the whole picture of your product or service. The key to a successful campaign is to find the right influencers.

Monitoring the web for conversations your audience have about your industry will help you find the right people.

Besides the list of the most influential public profiles, brand monitoring software will provide analytics metrics, for example, the share of voice and influence. Analyse the metrics and choose people your audience identifies with.

Product development

Your customers will not only leave online reviews, but they will also leave some interesting insights into product development.

People will talk about what they’re missing from your offer, what they want to improve, and which features might be completely useless.

That’s a goldmine of business development knowledge!

Customers’ ideas might not always be viable from a business point of view, as your customers don’t have a holistic view of your business.

Nevertheless, the ideas are worth exploring.

Let’s illustrate that with an example.

Imagine your products are pristine, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about. But the delivery company has misplaced the orders way too many times for it to be a coincidence.

Brand monitoring will indicate an issue with your overall business performance. That may include one of your subsidiaries, for example, a shipping company.

Read more: Discover top review monitoring solutions powered by advanced AI features.

How to set up a brand monitoring project?

Setting up a brand monitoring project is a piece of cake.

It’s a four-step process in our new project creation wizard. That sounds like a lot, but you’ll be done with it in no time!

Firstly, in the project creation wizard insert all the terms you’d like to monitor. Think about keywords such as:

• the name of your company
• the name of your product
• your branded hashtag
• your campaign-specific hashtag
• the name of C-suite managers or other highly recognisable employees

After you click “Create” the tool will start collecting all publicly available mentions. Brand monitoring tools, in general, don’t provide historical data.

No matter which brand monitoring tool you opt for, it will give you a much better grip on what is said about your brand.

Considering the fact, that the majority of conversations about your brand, product, or service happens online you need to be aware of the online chatter.

Monitoring brand across different online platforms will help you stay on top of things. Ready to start? Test Brand24 by signing up for 14-day free trial!