Mentient, a new brand monitoring platform, launches to help companies track mentions on Reddit, forums, and other sources that influence AI-generated vendor recommendations. Unlike legacy tools, Mentient uses AI to read mentions in context and assess sentiment, topic, and urgency.
— Brand reputation is being decided on Reddit and in AI answers, where keyword alerts rarely look
When buyers ask AI which vendor to pick, ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews name only three or four brands. Mentient, opening to general availability today, monitors the Reddit threads, forums, and reviews those answers are built from.
The conversations that decide a company’s reputation have moved off Google. Buyers now form opinions inside Reddit threads, YouTube comments, niche forums, and the AI answers they read before they ever reach a website. Gartner reported in 2026 that 70% of enterprise buyers use AI for vendor research. When one of those tools answers the question “which vendor should I pick,” ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews name only three or four brands, and they assemble that shortlist from the open web most monitoring tools never read.
The behavior changed fast. The share of US consumers using AI at the product discovery stage reached 35% in 2026, up from 13.6% two years earlier. Adobe Analytics measured the same current from a different angle: AI-driven traffic to US retail sites on Cyber Monday 2025 ran 670% ahead of the year before. Buyers are asking a model before they open a search box, and the model’s answer is only as good as the sources behind it.
Those sources are unevenly generous. Perplexity tends to cite around thirteen brands in an answer and Gemini roughly eight, while ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews settle on three or four. On the platforms most buyers reach for first, the distance between making the list and missing it comes down to a handful of mentions on the right threads. A brand absent from those upstream conversations is absent from the answer, and it never learns why.
Legacy tools were built for press releases and indexed news. They match a keyword and count it, so they miss the mention that never uses your exact brand name and read a sarcastic “oh good, another outage” as praise. Reddit is where much of this plays out, and it carries outsized weight: ChatGPT’s training data leans on it heavily, and Perplexity crawls community threads and cites them inline. In a single scan of one mid-size agency’s brand, Mentient surfaced 244 mentions that Google Alerts had never sent, most of them buried in comment threads and listicles. Mentient reads instead of matching. Mentient’s AI takes each mention in full and returns a plain-English read on sentiment, topic, and urgency.
“Ten years ago, your reputation lived on the first page of Google. Today it lives in a Reddit thread you were never tagged in and an AI answer you will never be shown,” said Pooja Agrawal, founder and CEO of Mentient. “Businesses do not need louder alerts. They need to understand what is being said about them, in context, while there is still time to respond.”
The platform scans Reddit across all public subreddits, along with news sites, blogs, review platforms, forums, developer communities such as Hacker News and Stack Overflow, and YouTube, around the clock. Mentient’s AI reads each mention in full and scores its sentiment, topic, and urgency in plain English. Crisis Detection learns a brand’s normal rate of negative mentions and sends a separate alert when negativity climbs above that baseline, usually while a thread is still small enough to answer well. When a reply is warranted, an AI drafter suggests an on-brand response the user reviews and sends. Mentient never posts on anyone’s behalf.
“Alerts tell you something happened. They do not tell you whether it matters,” said Pooja. “We built Mentient so a small team can see the difference between a passing complaint and the start of a real problem at a glance, and so the final word always belongs to a person.”
Mentient is available now at mentient.io. Plans start at $65 a month, setup takes about five minutes, and there is no sales call.
The shift is not slowing. As more buying decisions run through AI systems that summarize the open web, the brands that know what that web is saying about them, early and in context, will be the ones that shape the story. Mentient’s aim is to give every company that ability, the kind that used to require an enterprise contract and a full-time analyst, at the price of a tool.
About Mentient
Mentient is brand monitoring built for companies without a PR department. It continuously scans Reddit, news sites, blogs, forums, review platforms, developer communities, and YouTube for mentions of your brand and competitors. Instead of keyword matching, AI reads each mention in context and classifies sentiment, topic, and urgency in plain English. Crisis detection flags unusual spikes in negative mentions the moment they form, alerts arrive by email or Slack, and an AI reply-drafter suggests on-brand responses you review and send yourself. Plans start at $65/month, and setup takes about five minutes, no sales call required.
Contact Info:
Name: Pooja Agrawal
Email: Send Email
Organization: Mentient
Website: https://mentient.io
Release ID: 89197598
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