Reddit Brand Monitoring in Claude Cowork: Threads Worth Answering
Connect Apify to Claude Cowork, then schedule a daily task that searches Reddit for your brand and competitors with the Reddit Scraper Lite Actor. Claude throws out the false matches, tags the sentiment of the real mentions, and lists the threads where a reply from you would help. In our test, only 1 of 8 Reddit posts that matched a brand search was a real conversation about the product, so the filtering step is the actual job. A daily run of 30 items costs about $0.16 at the Free-plan list price.
Reddit is where people ask "is X worth it?", complain about a pricing change, and recommend tools to strangers. Those threads also get read by AI assistants. In Ahrefs' September 2026 data, reddit.com was the most-cited domain in ChatGPT answers for broad US queries, with 16.8% of citations (Ahrefs, updated 2 September 2026). That share moves around: Semrush saw ChatGPT cite Reddit in close to 60% of responses in early August 2025 and around 10% by mid-September (Semrush, 10 November 2025). The ranking is consistent even when the percentage is not, so an unanswered complaint thread about your product can end up shaping AI answers about you as well.
This post covers social platforms only, with Reddit first and TikTok and YouTube as optional add-ons. Whether AI assistants name your brand in their answers is a separate measurement, covered in tracking AI-search mentions with Claude.
Let Claude set it up for you
Paste this into Claude Cowork. It asks for your brand and competitors, checks the Apify connector, runs a small test with the cost shown, and only then creates the daily task. The sections after it explain each part, including the test results that shaped the filtering rules.
Claude interviews you, runs a small test search, then schedules a daily digest of mentions and threads worth answering.
- Asks for your brand, name variants, competitors and subreddits
- Checks the Apify connector is connected
- Runs a 10-item test and shows the cost
- Creates the daily scheduled task after you confirm
Help me set up daily Reddit monitoring for my brand. Work through this one
step at a time and ask me one question at a time.
1. Ask me, in turn: my brand name and every spelling people use for it;
words that share my brand name but mean something else (so we can
exclude them); my website domain; 2 to 4 competitor names; my brand's
own subreddit, if it has one; 2 to 5 subreddits where my buyers talk;
and whether I want a daily or weekly digest. Then repeat the setup
back to me as a short list.
2. Check that the Apify connector is available by calling
fetch-actor-details on trudax/reddit-scraper-lite. If it is not
connected, stop and tell me to add a custom connector in Customize >
Connectors with the URL https://mcp.apify.com?tools=actors,runs,storage
then wait for me to confirm.
3. Use only the Actor trudax/reddit-scraper-lite. Inputs: "searches" (a
list of search terms), "searchCommunityName" (to search inside one
subreddit), "searchPosts" true, "searchComments" true, "sort" "new",
"time" "day" for a daily digest or "week" for a weekly one,
"includeNSFW" false, "maxItems", "maxComments" 3.
4. Before running anything, read the Actor's current per-result price and
start fee with fetch-actor-details, estimate the cost of a test of 10
items and of one full scheduled run, and ask me to confirm. Run the
test only after I say yes.
5. Classify every item from the test into exactly one of:
ABOUT_US (a real conversation about my product), ABOUT_COMPETITOR,
LINK_ONLY (my domain appears only as a link, for example a form or a
shared file, with no opinion about the product), NAME_CLASH (the word
means something else), or IRRELEVANT. Only ABOUT_US and
ABOUT_COMPETITOR items get a sentiment label: positive, negative,
mixed, or question. Quote the sentence the label is based on.
6. For ABOUT_US items, flag a thread as WORTH_A_REPLY only if it asks a
question nobody has answered well, reports a problem, or asks for a
recommendation where my product fits. Give the reason in one line.
Do not draft replies unless I ask, and never post anything to Reddit.
7. Show me the test results as a table (subreddit, type, label,
sentiment, upvotes, comments, link) plus how many items were noise.
Never show Reddit usernames.
8. If I am happy with the test, show me the scheduled task you will
create: name, schedule, and full instructions repeating steps 3, 5, 6
and 7, ending with a three-line summary at the top. Create the
scheduled task only after I confirm.
Claude asks before each change it makes. Read each step before you approve it.
Two follow-ups to keep to hand once the task runs:
Draft a reply to this thread that I will edit and post myself: [link].
Read the whole thread first. Answer the question that was asked, say
plainly that I work for [brand], do not repeat marketing copy, and keep
it under 120 words. If the honest answer is that a competitor fits better,
say so.
Take the last seven daily Reddit digests in this project and group the
ABOUT_US and ABOUT_COMPETITOR items into themes (pricing, bugs, missing
features, comparisons, praise). Count each theme, show one quote per
theme with its link, and tell me which theme grew most this week.
The Actor and what it returns
The workflow uses one Actor: Reddit Scraper Lite (trudax/reddit-scraper-lite). It searches Reddit for posts and comments, can search inside a single subreddit, and returns one dataset item per post or comment. For a comparison with other Reddit Actors, see the Reddit scraper roundup; for the full input reference and first-run pitfalls, see how to scrape Reddit on Apify.
The inputs that matter for monitoring, checked against the Actor's input schema on 21 October 2026:
| Input | What it does | Value for monitoring |
|---|---|---|
searches | List of search terms | Brand name, spellings, competitor names |
searchCommunityName | Limits the search to one subreddit | Your brand's subreddit, buyer subreddits |
searchPosts / searchComments | Which item types to search | Both true |
sort | relevance, hot, top, new, rising, comments | new |
time | hour, day, week, month, year, all | day for a daily task, week for weekly |
maxItems | Cap on items saved | 30 for a daily run |
includeNSFW | Include NSFW results (default true) | false |
Post items carry title, body, communityName, upVotes, numberOfComments, createdAt and url. Comment items carry body, upVotes, postId, permalink and createdAt. Both carry a username field; the setup prompt tells Claude never to show it, because a digest about your brand does not need to profile individuals.
What a real test run returned
We ran the Actor twice on 21 October 2026 with the brand term "Airtable", sorted by new, limited to the past week. The first run searched posts and comments. The second searched posts only.
Run 1, posts and comments (9 items). Every item came back as a comment, and only 2 of the 9 contained the word "Airtable" at all. The comment search returns comments from threads that matched, not only comments that mention your term, so most of the result is the surrounding conversation.
Run 2, posts only (8 items). Real output from a test run on 2026-10-21, trimmed, usernames removed:
| Subreddit | Matched how | Upvotes | Comments | Label Claude should give it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| r/UGCs | Airtable form link in a hiring post | 2 | 1 | LINK_ONLY |
| r/UGCSideHustle | Same hiring post, cross-posted | 1 | 1 | LINK_ONLY |
| r/UGCs | Airtable form link in a hiring post | 4 | 7 | LINK_ONLY |
| r/ReformJews | Airtable form link in a fellowship announcement | 6 | 0 | LINK_ONLY |
| r/HeroForgeMinis | No visible match in title or body | 14 | 1 | IRRELEVANT |
| r/Airtable | Posted in the brand's own subreddit | 0 | 1 | ABOUT_US, question |
| r/B2BForHire | Freelancer listing Airtable as a skill | 1 | 0 | IRRELEVANT |
| r/CASEmembers | No visible match in title or body | 41 | 7 | IRRELEVANT |
One post in eight was a real conversation about the product: a user in r/Airtable asking how to get rid of something new in the product that annoyed them. Its text never used the word "Airtable", because nobody names the product inside the product's own subreddit. That one post is exactly what a monitoring task should surface, and a plain keyword filter would have thrown it away.
Three rules came out of this, and they are built into the setup prompt:
- Search your own subreddit separately. Run a search with
searchCommunityNameset to your brand's subreddit, and treat everything there as a candidate even when the brand name is missing. - Classify before you count. Hiring posts and sign-up forms built on your product are mentions of your domain, not opinions about your product. Counting them as mentions would have reported five mentions where there was one.
- Let Claude judge relevance, not a regex. A keyword match missed the one real thread and kept five noisy ones. Claude reading the text and quoting the sentence behind each label is the part that makes the digest usable.
Step 1: Connect Apify to Cowork
If you have not connected Apify yet, follow the Cowork connector guide. In Cowork, go to Customize → Connectors, add a custom connector, and use this URL:
https://mcp.apify.com?tools=actors,runs,storage
Per Apify's MCP documentation, actors gives Claude search-actors, fetch-actor-details and call-actor; runs adds get-actor-run-list, which a scheduled task can use to look up earlier runs; and storage adds the dataset tools, including get-dataset-items. Leaving out the default apify/rag-web-browser and apify/web-fetch tools means every paid run goes through call-actor, where you can see it.
Step 2: Choose what to search
Spend five minutes on the search terms. They decide most of the quality.
- Your brand and its spellings. Include common misspellings and the short form people type, such as "HubSpot" and "hubspot crm".
- Name clashes to exclude. If your brand is also an ordinary word, tell Claude so it labels those items NAME_CLASH instead of reporting them.
- Competitors. Two to four names. Complaints about a competitor in a thread where nobody has suggested an alternative are often the best threads to answer.
- Subreddits. Your own subreddit, plus two to five where your buyers ask for recommendations. Search each with
searchCommunityName.
Keep the list short. Each extra term adds items, and the cost is per item.
Step 3: Run it once by hand
Before scheduling anything, ask Claude to run the search once with maxItems at 10 and show the classified table. Read every row yourself and check the labels. If Claude marks a hiring post as ABOUT_US or misses a real complaint, add a one-line rule to the instructions and run it again. Two or three rounds is usually enough for the labels to settle.
Step 4: Make it daily
Turn the tested instructions into a Cowork scheduled task. Scheduled tasks can run hourly, daily, on weekdays or weekly, use your connectors, and keep running when your computer is asleep, per Anthropic's help article. In Cowork, open Scheduled, click New task, and paste the instructions the setup prompt produced.
Set time to day for a daily task so each run looks only at the last 24 hours. That avoids re-reporting threads you saw yesterday without needing to compare datasets. If you prefer a weekly digest, set time to week and run it on Mondays.
Add TikTok and YouTube (optional)
Reddit carries the written conversations. TikTok and YouTube carry the review videos. If you want them in the same digest, add one Actor each:
| Platform | Actor | Listed price checked 21 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok | TikTok Scraper (clockworks/tiktok-scraper) | $0.0037 per result, $0.001 per run start |
| YouTube | YouTube Scraper (streamers/youtube-scraper) | $0.004 per result |
Ask Claude to search each platform for your brand name, sorted by newest, and apply the same labels to titles and descriptions. Video comments are where the opinions are, but they multiply the item count fast, so start with videos only. For what a YouTube transcript adds to review mining, see voice of customer analysis with Claude, which codes review videos alongside G2 and App Store reviews.
What it costs
Reddit Scraper Lite charges per stored result plus a start fee of $0.02 per GB of run memory. Prices from the Actor's pricing on 21 October 2026:
| Plan tier | Per result | Daily run of 30 items, 2 GB start | Per 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0.004 | $0.16 | $4.80 |
| Starter | $0.0038 | $0.154 | $4.62 |
Our two test runs above cost $0.054 (9 items) and $0.050 (8 items) on a Starter plan, each with a 1 GB start fee of $0.02. If Cowork starts the Actor at its default memory, the start fee is $0.04 instead, which is what the table assumes.
The cost is driven by maxItems, not by how many threads turn out to matter. A daily run that returns 30 items and finds one thread worth answering costs the same as one that finds ten.
Replying without getting banned
The digest finds threads. A person should decide what to say.
- Say who you are. A reply from someone who works for the brand reads very differently once the affiliation comes out later. State it in the reply.
- Read the subreddit's rules. Many communities restrict self-promotion or ban vendor replies outright. Check the sidebar before you post.
- Answer the question asked. If a competitor genuinely fits the poster's need better, saying so builds more trust than a pitch.
- Never automate posting. The setup prompt tells Claude to draft only. Automated posting from a brand account is the fastest way to get the account and the domain banned from a community.
On the collection side, Reddit's own Data API is the better choice when you need a first-party integration your legal team can point to. The trade-offs are covered in how to scrape Reddit on Apify, and our view on public-data collection is in is Apify legal.
When a dedicated tool is the better choice
If all you need is an email when your brand name appears, F5Bot does that for free: it monitors Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for your keywords every few minutes. It does not classify, filter or summarise, so on a brand name that is also used in links and forms you get every false match in this post's test.
At the other end, teams monitoring many networks with dashboards and shared inboxes are better served by a full social listening platform. The Cowork setup sits in between: your own labels, your own reply rules, the quoted evidence behind every flag, and a bill of a few dollars a month. For scheduled monitoring across Instagram, TikTok, X and LinkedIn without Claude in the loop, see social media monitoring automation and the social media analytics use case.
FAQ
Run a Reddit search Actor such as Reddit Scraper Lite on Apify for your brand name, sorted by new and limited to the last day, then have Claude classify each result. Search your brand's own subreddit separately, because people there rarely type the brand name. A Claude Cowork scheduled task can repeat this every day.
Reddit search matches links and surrounding thread context as well as opinions. In our October 2026 test, 4 of 8 posts matching a brand name were hiring posts or announcements that only linked to a form built on the product. Classify every item before counting mentions.
At the Free-plan list price on 21 October 2026, Reddit Scraper Lite charges $0.004 per result plus a start fee of $0.02 per GB of memory. A daily run capped at 30 items costs about $0.16, or about $4.80 per 30 days.
It can draft a reply for you to edit, but this workflow never posts. Post replies yourself, disclose that you work for the brand, and follow each subreddit's rules on self-promotion.
Reddit is among the most-cited domains in AI answers. Ahrefs measured reddit.com at 16.8% of ChatGPT citations for broad US queries in September 2026, though Semrush has shown that share swinging widely from month to month. Unanswered complaint threads can therefore surface in AI answers about your product.
Next steps
Connect Apify to Cowork with the connector guide, paste the setup prompt, and read the first test table row by row before you schedule it. For mentions inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers rather than on Reddit, see tracking brand mentions in AI search, and for more marketing prompts, Claude prompts that use live web data.