What you get
The counter opens a free page for the keyword with mentions over the last 30 days, the last 7 days and the last 24 hours, split into posts and comments. A chart shows the count per day so a spike stands out, and the change on the week before tells you whether talk is rising or falling. Below that sit the five communities that mention the keyword most and a sample of recent threads, each with its highest scoring reply.
Counts come from Redlisten's index of public Reddit posts and comments, collected as they are posted and kept for 30 days. That matters for a counter: a tool that polls a page of the newest posts misses what scrolls past between checks, so its totals drift low on busy topics. A count built from the full stream of posts and comments does not.
Good uses
Brand and product teams check whether a launch, an outage or a price change moved the conversation, and compare against a competitor by running both names. Researchers and writers size how much a topic is discussed before committing to a piece. Founders test whether people already talk about the problem they want to solve, and in which communities. Investors watch chatter around a company or a ticker.
Tips for a clean count
Pick the words people actually type. A product is usually mentioned by its short name, not its legal name, so "notion" beats "Notion Labs". Very common words return big numbers that mean little; add a second word to narrow it. Names that collide with everyday words, like "apple" or "shell", mix two topics together, so check the sample threads before trusting the total.
Every page also has a machine readable twin. Add ?format=json to the address to get the same counts, communities and sample threads as JSON, which is handy for a spreadsheet or a quick script.
Three worked examples
A launch. Run your product name the day before and the week after a launch. The per day chart shows whether the launch produced a spike and whether the talk held up or faded within days. The sample threads tell you what people actually said, which matters more than the total.
A competitor. Run your name and a competitor's name side by side in two tabs. If theirs rises sharply on one day, open the sample threads for that day; a price change, an outage or a viral complaint usually explains it, and those threads are where switching decisions get made.
A market. Run the name of a problem rather than a product, such as "invoice software" or "home server noise". The top communities list shows where that problem lives on Reddit, which is the list of places to read before building anything.
What the counter does not do
It counts public posts and comments where the keyword appears in the text, so a photo post with no words about the product is not counted. It does not read private or quarantined communities. And it does not score sentiment; the sample threads are there so you can judge tone yourself.
When you need more
The free counter covers one keyword at a time and refreshes daily. With a key you can call the same counts through /v1/trends for any keyword and any day range up to 30 days, compare several keywords on one chart with /v1/trends/compare, and create a keyword stream that backfills 30 days of matches and then sends each new one to Slack, Discord, a webhook or a daily email. A free key is created at signup with 250 requests a month; Pro is $29 a month. The docs show each call.
Redlisten is not affiliated with Reddit, Inc.