When I started building Heylerts, the first question was: where do brand mentions actually happen? Google Alerts only catches a fraction. Social listening tools charge enterprise prices. I wanted something that covers the places founders and small teams actually care about — and does it affordably.

Heylerts currently monitors six sources, each with a dedicated worker. Here is how each one works, what it catches, and what makes the combination more powerful than any single source.

The six sources

1. Brave Search

Brave Search has its own independent web index — it is not a skin over Bing or Google. That means it surfaces results the others miss, especially from smaller blogs, indie sites, and niche directories. The Brave Search API provides up to 20 results per query, and Heylerts checks it on every scan cycle. The free tier includes 2,000 queries per month, which is more than enough for most users.

2. Reddit

Reddit is one of the most important sources for brand mentions. When someone asks “has anyone tried X?” or “what do you think of Y?”, it usually happens on Reddit. Heylerts searches Reddit directly for your keyword and picks up posts and comments from every subreddit. This catches mentions that Google often takes days or weeks to index.

3. Hacker News

If you are building a tech product, Hacker News mentions can drive significant traffic and signups. The HN Algolia API lets Heylerts search both stories and comments in real time. A single mention in a popular HN thread can generate thousands of visits — you want to know about it immediately, not days later.

4. Google News

Google News aggregates articles from thousands of news outlets. Heylerts queries it to catch press coverage, industry news, and editorial mentions. This is especially useful for tracking competitor launches, industry trends, and any media coverage of your brand.

5. NewsAPI

NewsAPI provides access to articles from over 150,000 news sources and blogs. It complements Google News by surfacing coverage from smaller outlets that Google News may not include. The combination of Google News and NewsAPI gives Heylerts broad news coverage without blind spots.

6. Google via SerpAPI (Starter plan and above)

SerpAPI provides structured Google search results. This is the broadest source — it catches mentions on any indexed page, including forums, review sites, directories, and personal blogs. Because SerpAPI charges per search, this source is available on the Starter plan ($79/year) and above. Free-tier users get the other five sources, which still cover the most important mention channels.

How the scan cycle works

Heylerts uses a background task scheduler (Celery with Redis as the message broker) that runs every 30 minutes. On each cycle, the system checks every active alert and decides whether it is due for a scan based on the user's plan:

Free: scanned once every 24 hours
Starter: every 6 hours (4 times per day)
Pro: every 4 hours (6 times per day)
Business: every 2 hours (12 times per day)

When an alert is due, Heylerts fires off requests to the appropriate sources in parallel. Each source worker returns a list of raw mentions — a URL, title, snippet, and publication date. The system then deduplicates them using a SHA-256 hash of the normalized URL and title, so the same article showing up on Brave Search and Google only appears once in your dashboard.

Enrichment: Domain Authority and PageRank

Raw mentions are useful, but knowing how authoritative the mentioning site is changes how you prioritize. A mention on a DA-80 news site matters more than one on a DA-5 blog. Heylerts enriches every mention with two scores:

Open PageRank (available on all plans) — a free, open-source approximation of Google's original PageRank metric. Cached for 7 days per domain.

Deduplication and content hashing

The same mention can appear across multiple sources. A blog post about your product might show up in Brave Search, Google via SerpAPI, and NewsAPI. Without deduplication, you would see it three times.

Heylerts generates a content_hash for each mention — a SHA-256 hash of the normalized URL combined with the title. If a new mention matches an existing hash, it is silently dropped. This keeps your dashboard clean and your email digests focused on genuinely new mentions.

Email digests

Not everyone wants to check a dashboard. Heylerts sends email digests — daily at 9 AM UTC or weekly on Monday at 9 AM UTC, depending on the frequency you set per alert. Each digest includes only mentions that have not been previously notified, so you never see the same item twice.

Why six sources beat one

Google Alerts, the most common brand monitoring tool, only tracks Google Search results — and it misses many of those. In our testing, Google Alerts failed to catch mentions on Reddit, Hacker News comments, and smaller blogs that were not yet indexed by Google.

By combining six independent sources, Heylerts casts a wider net. Brave Search catches indie sites Google misses. Reddit and Hacker News catch real-time conversations. Google News and NewsAPI catch press coverage. And SerpAPI fills in everything else from Google's index. The result: fewer missed mentions, faster detection, and a more complete picture of your brand's online presence.

Start monitoring your brand for free — the free plan includes 2 alerts and access to five of the six sources. No credit card required.