lurk

lurk is a free, open-source monitoring tool that watches Reddit and X to help you find customers, get cited by AI services such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, and rank on Google. It keeps an eye on Reddit and X for people asking for a product like yours, scores every post with a one-line reason, and sends new ones to email, Slack, Discord or a webhook. Alongside lead monitoring, it finds the Reddit threads Google already ranks for your keywords, and shows which competitors get recommended in the conversations your leads sit in. It is built for founders, marketers, sales teams and anyone doing go-to-market work who wants to know where a buying conversation is happening, who started it, why it matched, and what the community allows before deciding whether to join in. It exists because watching social platforms by hand does not scale, and simple keyword alerts are not accurate enough to act on. A keyword alert fires on every match, so you get volume without judgement. lurk takes a different approach: unlike a keyword alert, it reads the whole post and the community rules before it calls something a lead. That means a post is not just a match on a string, it is assessed in context, with the stage the person is at, a written reason, and the exact phrase that triggered the match. The result is a shorter, more trustworthy list of conversations worth joining. The tool also targets a second, longer-lived opportunity: Reddit threads that already rank on Google and are increasingly cited by AI assistants, where one useful reply can keep working for a long time. Lead detection is the core of lurk. Every Reddit post, Reddit comment and X post it scans is scored, and each score comes with a written reason and the phrase that matched, so you can see the evidence rather than trust a black box. Leads are labelled by the stage the person is at, such as comparing or solution seeking, and carry signals like fit, intent and engagement. Because lurk reads the whole thread, it also surfaces cases where one thread contains more than one person asking, saving the conversation so you can follow it as a whole. Each lead shows who asked, what they said, why it matched, and the policy of the community it appeared in, such as a rule requiring you to contribute value instead of blatantly promoting yourself. Reddit SEO is the second column of the product. lurk searches your keywords on Google, filters the results down to Reddit discussions that already rank, and lists the threads along with their position, the community they sit in, when they were posted and how many comments they have. It also notes when a competitor is named in a thread, because a thread that already compares tools is a natural place for a careful answer. Positions and metrics are saved at the time they were observed, so you can see which threads are still alive rather than relying on a single snapshot, and the hosted plan refreshes this SEO data every seven days. The stated value is durability: these are threads Google already ranks, so one reply keeps working. Competitor tracking shows who gets recommended in the threads your leads sit in, measured over the last 30 days. lurk counts how many times each competitor is mentioned, for example Jotform, Typeform and Google Forms each with seven mentions in the sample shown, and it also reports how each mention was meant, including negative mentions, so you can see whether sentiment is running for or against a given tool. It groups recurring pain themes across your saved leads, such as people looking for a simpler alternative to a particular product or struggling with repetitive form building, and labels leads by situation: asking for what you sell, leaving a competitor, or building their own. Posts where someone is building their own are ranked by reach, so a reply is more likely to be seen. Delivery is deliberately low-effort. New leads arrive as a digest in Slack or Discord or by email, or they can be pushed to a custom webhook, and each item carries the score, the reason and a link, so no one has to open a dashboard to triage. Scan cadence is daily, at the hour you pick, and the product keeps 30 days of saved examples. Community policy is surfaced next to each lead, so you can see whether a subreddit forbids blatant self-promotion or requires you to contribute value first, and when the policy cannot be read, lurk says so rather than guessing. In the hosted free tier you get two projects, 25 keywords per project, 10 communities per project, daily scanning, seven-day SEO refresh, 1,000 API reads per day and daily alerts to Slack and Discord plus one custom webhook. The approach is read-only and evidence-first. lurk never posts and never sends DMs, and there is no tool in its API for posting or sending a DM; its job is to find and explain, not to act on your behalf. The software itself is open source under the MIT licence and can be self-hosted in one command: Docker starts the app and Postgres, and the scoring instructions live in a file in src/lib/prompts.ts rather than being a hidden secret, so you can run it on your own key and with your own model. A read-only API and an MCP server let your own tools and agents read projects, leads and SEO rows, and an API schema and agent guide are published for that purpose. The hosted option keeps a wallet-based free tier for people who would rather not run anything. Practically, lurk is meant to shorten the distance between a public question and a useful answer. Instead of scrolling subreddits and timelines or sifting an unfiltered keyword feed, you get a scored shortlist with the reasoning attached, which is faster to act on and easier to trust. Because community rules are shown alongside the post, you can join conversations in a way that respects the space, and because the same lead appears with its matched phrase and stage, you can prioritise the people who are furthest along. The SEO side aims at durable visibility rather than one-off traffic: threads that already rank on Google keep being found, and the same threads are increasingly surfaced by AI assistants, which is why the product frames its promise as getting cited by AI as well as ranking on Google. All of this runs on a free tier or on your own infrastructure, so the cost of watching a market is low. Concrete workflows follow the lead types. A founder selling a scheduling tool watches Reddit and X for people asking for a Calendly alternative and replying that they want round-robin scheduling; lurk surfaces that post, explains that the person needs an affordable Calendly alternative for round-robin scheduling, and flags it as a good lead so the founder can answer with something useful. A marketing team tracking a form builder looks for people who find an established tool overkill for basic surveys and want something non-technical staff can manage, then replies in the ranked Reddit threads that already sit at positions four and five on Google. A sales team routes the daily digest into Slack so account owners can pick up new asks as they appear, while a growth team checks competitor mentions to see who is being recommended and whether any of that sentiment has turned negative. Agents and internal tools can pull the same data through the read-only API or MCP to build their own views. lurk is aimed at founders, indie makers, marketers and sales teams who sell into communities rather than only through ads, and at teams that already do social listening but want scoring and SEO context instead of raw alerts. Its stated integrations are Slack, Discord, email and custom webhooks for alerts, plus a read-only API and an MCP server for tools and agents. Self-hosting requires Docker and Postgres, with the scoring logic editable in src/lib/prompts.ts and the option to run on your own key and model. Pricing is free at the base level, with a hosted free plan that includes two projects, 25 keywords per project, 10 communities per project, daily scanning, 1,000 API reads per day, and daily Slack and Discord alerts plus one custom webhook; you can also start on a house wallet within the hosted free limits, connect your own wallet, or self-host. For comparison, published entry plans for similar tools are listed at $10, $13.99 and $29 per month, while lurk itself is described as free. Taken together, lurk is best understood as a listening layer for people who sell in public. It watches Reddit and X, decides which posts are genuinely worth your attention and explains why, points you at the Reddit threads Google already ranks, and shows how competitors are being discussed in the same conversations. It never posts or DMs, it can be self-hosted from a single Docker command, and it exposes its data through a read-only API and MCP so other tools can build on it. The promise it repeats on its own homepage is simple: find the ask, and bring something useful.