What is new in MentionDrop

After we analysed your website, the keyword step used to hand you ten suggestions with nothing selected and ask you to tick at least three. That turned the first real screen of the product into a setup task before you had seen a single mention.

Now the terms there is nothing to decide about are already ticked for you: your brand name and the product and category language your own site uses. Competitor tracking sits in its own group, clearly marked optional, so watching a rival is something you choose rather than something you have to switch off.

The button underneath changed too. It used to say "Monitor 3 keywords, choose a plan". Now it says "Show me what you found", because that is what the next screen actually does. You still pick a plan, just after you have seen real mentions rather than before.

Everything stays editable. Untick anything that does not fit, add a competitor if you want one, and carry on.

Four improvements rolled out this week to make MentionDrop mention data more actionable and retention longer.

• Recent content only from search sources. Search-based sources used to occasionally surface articles from years back, which cluttered your feed with outdated content. They now fetch content from the past 90 days only, so your mentions are fresh and current.
• New job listings source (rolling out). If you track your company name, product name, or a technology, you can now see job postings that mention it alongside your other mentions. Rolling out to Starter and Pro users this week.
• Hacker News mentions including comment threads. MentionDrop now monitors Hacker News stories and comments for your keywords, including mentions nested deep inside discussion threads.
• Extended mention history. Starter plans now keep 90 days of mention history (up from 30), and Pro plans keep 180 days (up from 90). Your monitoring history stays accessible longer.

Together these changes mean your mentions are fresher, your sources are broader, and your history is deeper.

Your mentions are no longer locked inside the dashboard. MentionDrop now ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and a public HTTP API, so your AI tools can read and act on your brand monitoring directly.

• MCP server for AI agents. Point Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-compatible client at https://www.mentiondrop.com/api/mcp and ask things like "what did people say about my brand this week?" or "draft a reply to that Reddit thread." Eleven tools cover keywords, mentions, digests, competitor signals, pain signals, and reply drafts. Setup takes about a minute: docs.
• HTTP API. Everything the dashboard shows is available under /api/v1: mentions, keywords, digests, and reply drafts, authenticated with your API key. See the API docs.
• API keys in Settings. Generate your key from the Settings page. Keys use the md_live_ format and can be revoked and regenerated at any time.
• Fair-use rate limit. API and MCP requests are limited to 60 per minute per key, which is far more than any agent session needs.

If you connect an agent and something feels off, reply to any MentionDrop email and I will help you set it up personally.

The landing page previously showed placeholder spec numbers that didn't reflect real usage. A few things changed today to make the page more honest about what MentionDrop actually does.

• Real platform totals on the landing page. The stats strip now shows live numbers: 190,000+ mentions analyzed by AI since March 2026 and 39,000+ distinct domains those mentions came from, with a note showing when the figures were last verified. No more placeholder spec numbers.
• The live demo connects to real monitoring. After browsing the sample results, you can now click straight through to start monitoring the same brand for real. No dead ends.
• Sample brand chips are clickable. Tapping a brand chip in the demo loads that brand's sample data immediately, so the demo is interactive rather than static.

A keyword like HubSpot or CRM can quietly bring in tens of thousands of mentions per month while a more specific term like iii.dev brings in eight. Until now you had no way to see that without scrolling through page after page.

Every keyword pill on the mentions page now shows its 30-day volume right next to the name — HubSpot 42k, iii.dev 8. Numbers reflect what you actually see (your relevance threshold is applied), and refresh every five minutes.

A pill quietly screaming "42k" is usually the product telling you that keyword is too broad. Try narrowing it to a phrase, raising its relevance threshold, or adding exclusion words.

Available on all plans.

The first screen of onboarding asked for a website URL with no preview of what came next. Three-quarters of recent signups left without typing anything.

A few changes shipped today to fix that:

• Worked example up front. Step 1 now shows a Notion-style preview (company summary, three example keywords) so you can see your own version before you commit your URL.
• Bare domains work. Typing notion.com works just as well as https://notion.com. No more silent rejections from over-strict URL validation.
• Manual keyword path. If you'd rather not share a URL, there's a "enter keywords manually" option that skips straight to typing the terms you want to monitor.
• Day-1 follow-up for stuck signups. If you create an account but don't finish onboarding, you'll now get a personal note from me the next day with a path back in. No marketing fluff.
• Honest pricing up front. A subtle line on the onboarding page now says "Plans start at $29/mo after a free analysis" so there's no surprise paywall after three steps.

Plus PostHog events on every step so we can finally see exactly where people drop off and keep tightening this.

Sometimes your keyword shows up where you don't want it. "Box" appears in unboxing videos. "Sage" turns up in cooking articles. "Notion" gets cited in philosophy papers.

You can now add exclusion words to any keyword and we'll drop mentions that contain them before they reach your inbox. Open the keyword, click "Exclude words from results", type a word, and press Enter. Remove it any time with the X button.

This works per-keyword so exclusions for one keyword never affect your others. Up to 20 exclusion terms per keyword, filtered at match time so nothing is stored and nothing is retroactive — only new incoming mentions are checked.

Available on all plans.

MentionDrop now tracks competitors, not just your own brand.

Tag any keyword as Own brand, Competitor, or Industry on the Keywords page. Competitor keywords feed a new Competitors page with three things on it: stat cards comparing total mentions, sentiment, and share of voice for each brand you track; a bar chart showing share-of-voice over the last 30 days; and a leaderboard of the domains driving the conversation, so you can see at a glance whether your competitor is winning on Reddit, in news, or on independent blogs.

Industry keywords (the category terms like "brand monitoring" or "social listening") are tracked but kept out of share-of-voice math, so a generic category word doesn't drown out the brand-vs-brand picture.

This is the same Firehose pipeline, the same AI summaries, and the same alert delivery you already use, just pointed at the competitive set instead of only your name.

Available on Starter and Pro. Free users get a locked preview of the Competitors page so you can see what it looks like before upgrading.

We tightened up how much mention history each tier keeps:

• Free: 7 days of mention history (was unlimited)
• Starter: 30 days
• Pro: 90 days

Older mentions are still in the system, but only visible to plans that include them. This makes the free tier honest about what it does (watch your own brand, recent mentions only) and lets the paid tiers do the bigger job they were always meant for: portfolio and competitor intel.

If you were on Free and used the longer history, this is the one breaking change. Upgrading to Starter at $29/mo gets you the 30-day window plus the rest of the paid feature set.

You asked for it: every mention now has a one-click action to generate a response.

Reddit threads get a short public reply suitable to post in the conversation. Blog posts and news articles get a personalised cold outreach email with a subject line, ready to send privately to the author. The right mode is picked automatically based on where the mention came from.

You always review and copy the draft before anything goes out. Nothing is sent automatically. Drafts live in a new Reply Drafts page in your sidebar, with tabs for pending, approved, and rejected. Each draft includes the AI's confidence score, a one-line rationale, and any risk flags worth a second look.

Available on Starter and Pro.

If you opened a MentionDrop link from inside the LinkedIn app, Instagram, X, or another in-app browser, then tapped Sign in with Google, Google blocked you with a 403 error. That is Google's policy against OAuth from embedded webviews, not something we could fix on our side.

Now the sign-in and sign-up pages detect the in-app browser, name the app you are in, and tell you to open the page in Chrome or Safari before signing in. There is also a one-tap button to copy the page link.

Every mention card on your dashboard now has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Hit thumbs down on the ones that miss the mark, thumbs up on the ones that nail it. The AI takes the hint and gets sharper for that keyword from there on out.

The more you mark, the better it gets at filtering out the noise: the listicles, the aggregator pages, the "10 alternatives to..." posts that tend to slip through.

Two things worth knowing:

1. It only affects future mentions. Existing ones keep their current scores.
2. If your needs change, just keep marking. It adapts.

A common pattern: someone signs up, gets distracted, and never adds a keyword. The product never gets a chance to prove itself.

If you fall into that bucket, you now get a single follow-up email three days after signup with three specific keyword suggestions based on the website you entered during onboarding. One click adds them, and the alerts start flowing.

This only fires once. If you ignore it, that is the end of it.

When MentionDrop drafts a reply for you, it now picks between two modes based on the source of the mention.

Reply mode is for when you are jumping into an existing thread (a Reddit comment, a forum reply, a discussion thread). Drafts skip the formal greeting and read like the next message in the conversation.

Outreach mode is for when the mention came from a blog post, news article, or somewhere else that needs a fresh email. Drafts include a subject line and the kind of opening you would actually use cold.

The right mode is picked automatically. You can still edit before sending.

If you signed up, are still on the free plan, and have not received a useful mention by day seven, you will now get a short coaching email from me.

It covers the most common reasons people stall (keyword too generic, keyword too narrow, missing exclusions) and points to the fix. No upsell, no fake urgency. The goal is to get you to the value, because if MentionDrop never lands a useful mention for you, the upgrade conversation never happens anyway.

The first onboarding step now asks for your website URL. MentionDrop fetches the page, summarises what your company does, and uses that context to suggest keywords that actually fit your business instead of generic guesses.

If you would rather skip it and add keywords manually, you still can. But spending the extra ten seconds gets you a much better starting set.