How to track Hacker News discussions about your company

Hacker News has no notification for mentions, so finding out when your company comes up means searching for it yourself or using a tool that searches for you. The site's own search, linked at the bottom of every Hacker News page, runs on Algolia at hn.algolia.com. You can search for your company or product name, choose stories or comments, sort by popularity or by date, and limit the results to the past day, week, or month. Hacker News also lists every story submitted from a given website at news.ycombinator.com/from?site= followed by your domain, which shows each time someone posted a link to your site.

To hear about new mentions without searching every day, you can set a keyword alert. Free services such as F5Bot email you when a word you choose appears on Hacker News, and paid social listening tools cover Hacker News alongside other sites. Developers can also query Algolia's Hacker News search API directly, which is free and needs no key.

These routes find text that matches your keywords, and that's where they stop. Every hit lands in your inbox with the same weight, whether it's a 400-comment thread about your outage, a passing mention in a "Who is hiring?" thread, or a comment about a different company that happens to share your name. You still have to open each one, read the thread around it, decide whether it's about you, and decide whether anyone should respond.

That reading is the real work in this job. A good result tells you about each new discussion of your company soon enough to join it while people are still talking, which on Hacker News usually means within a day. It also tells you what the discussion says, so you know whether to reply, fix something, or simply note it.

Kite does that work for you. It searches Hacker News stories and comments for your names, reads the threads, decides which new mentions are about you, and tells you what each one says.

Start by asking Kite to watch Hacker News for your company, in the Kite web app or in Slack:

"Tell me whenever someone on Hacker News mentions us or our product, and draft a reply when a comment needs one."

You can also ask for a look back before the watch begins:

"What has Hacker News said about us over the past year?"

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. From that research, it already knows your company name, your product names, your domain, and your competitors, so it can propose the terms to search for without a long brief. Confirm the terms or add to them, for example with an older product name or a common misspelling, and Kite sets up the watch.

You don't need a Hacker News account or any other connection. Hacker News search is one of Kite's built-in research sources. Kite tells you where its alerts will reach you: the conversation where you asked, your team's Slack channel, or an email to you.

Kite searches for every name people actually use for your company, because Hacker News commenters rarely write a company's full name or link to its site. The search terms usually include the company name, each product name, and your domain. Kite takes them from your team's knowledge base and adds any you name.

A name that is also a common word or another company's name needs more care. For those, Kite judges each result from the comment's own words and the thread's subject, so a comment about a different company with your name doesn't reach you as a mention.

Kite starts with the discussions that already exist, because they show how this audience talks about you before any new mention arrives. It searches Hacker News stories that mention you and ranks them by relevance. For each story, it reads the title, the link, who submitted it, when, its points, and its number of comments. Then it searches comments, which return each commenter's name, the full text of the comment, its date, and the story it was posted under.

For the threads that matter most, Kite reads the whole discussion: the story and the comments beneath it, with each reply under the comment it answers. From those threads, it pulls out what keeps coming up, such as the features people praise, the complaints that repeat, the questions nobody answered, and the competitors people recommend instead. Kite saves those findings in your team's knowledge base, so later work, such as a pricing page rewrite or a comparison page, starts from what this audience has already said.

Kite keeps a standing watch on Hacker News, which is a check that runs on a schedule and stays quiet until it finds something new. By default the watch checks every six hours, and you can ask for checks as often as every hour. Each check searches only Hacker News for your terms and looks for stories and comments posted since the previous check.

A general brand watch, which searches the whole web for mentions of your company, can also turn up Hacker News threads. A watch confined to Hacker News makes sure a busy week of news coverage or reviews doesn't crowd out a comment thread that's growing fast.

Kite tells you about a new mention only when it is actually about your company. Kite reads the comment or story, and the thread around it when the context matters, before it decides. A mention of a company that shares your name stays out, and so does a comment that only repeats a mention you've already heard about.

For each mention that passes, Kite decides what kind of mention it is. It might be a story about your launch, a question about how you compare with a competitor, a recommendation of your product in someone else's thread, or a complaint. That decision shapes what Kite says in the alert and whether it drafts a reply.

Each alert tells you where the mention is, what it says, and whether it's positive, neutral, or critical, with a link straight to the comment or story. It quotes the words that matter, names the thread they appear in, and gives the commenter's name and the time they posted.

When a comment asks a question or gets a fact wrong, Kite drafts a short reply your team could post. It writes the reply from your own facts in the knowledge base, such as what each pricing plan includes, so the answer is accurate and doesn't promise a fix or a date. Someone on your team posts the reply from their own Hacker News account, which is how this community expects a company to show up in a discussion. If you want the reply worded differently, ask Kite in the same conversation and it will revise it.

Some mentions point at something worth fixing, and Kite can take that work on next. If several commenters can't tell what a plan includes, Kite can rewrite the pricing page copy, and on a website Kite hosts, it publishes the change once you approve it. If a thread compares you with a competitor, Kite can use the arguments people made to write a comparison page or sharpen your positioning.

You can change the watch whenever you like. Ask Kite to add a term, check more often, pause the watch for a while, or stop it. Ask why the watch exists, and Kite tells you the reason it recorded when the watch began.

When the work is set up, you have a record of what Hacker News has said about you and a watch that tells you about new discussions as they happen.