Core Concepts

Think of keywords as buyer-intent signals. Choose phrases your ideal customer would use when they have a problem you solve.

How matching works: a keyword matches when the phrase appears in the post, case-insensitively. There is no stemming or synonym expansion, so keep keywords short (one to three words): "affiliate tracking" matches far more real posts than"affiliate tracking software for SaaS". The AI intent score, not the keyword, decides whether the match is a lead.

💡 Tip: Use AI-powered keyword discovery in the dashboard to find related phrases your customers use.

HotMention's AI reads each conversation and scores it based on buying intent. High scores mean the person is actively looking for a solution.

What affects the score:

• Urgency ("I need this ASAP" = higher score)
• Specificity ("looking for a tool with X feature" = higher)
• Budget signals ("willing to pay" = higher)
• Competitor mentions (indicates active research)
• Question format ("what's the best..." = higher)

💡 Tip: Focus on HOT (70+) leads first. These convert at 5-10x higher rates.

💡 Tip: Start with Reddit (great signal-to-noise ratio), then expand to X and LinkedIn as you scale.

HotMention provides a kanban-style pipeline to manage your leads:

Why it matters: Moving leads through stages helps you measure conversion rates, optimize your approach, and focus on the right conversations.

For every lead with high enough intent, HotMention's AI writes a draft reply. It:

• Reads the full conversation context
• Matches your product to their specific need
• Suggests helpful, non-spammy language
• Keeps replies short and conversational

💡 Tip: Always customize the draft! Add personal touches, reference their specific pain point, and be genuinely helpful.

Reddit removes replies from accounts it does not trust, however good the text. In our previous product real people wrote the replies from a pool of accounts, and most were still deleted, while the same kind of reply from the customer's own account lived far longer. So the only account that posts through HotMention is the customer's (or their own agent's, from that account), and the product makes that reply survive, in three parts.

💡 The Overview shows Reddit replies live / removed / verifying and a 30-day survival rate. The weekly report repeats it, and the first reply that is still live on day 7 is worth celebrating.

Every project gets up to 30 buying prompts: category-level questions a buyer would ask (“best email warmup tool for cold outreach”), never naming your brand or a competitor. Each week HotMention asks ChatGPT (with web search), Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude every prompt several times, because answers vary from run to run, and records which brands and which sources each answer cites.

AI-cited threads. When a cited source is a Reddit thread worth replying in, it joins your lead feed with a draft and the badge AI-cited. These leads are capped at WARM, never HOT, never trigger notifications, and cost nothing until you act on one: they are strategic, not urgent. Filter for them with view = AI-cited in the dashboard or include_ai_cited in the API.

Competitors. Up to 5 per project, with domains, so the scoreboard can name who is cited instead of you and whether their own site or a Reddit thread is the source.

💡 We do not claim that a reply moved the scoreboard. Engines answer probabilistically and change with every model update; the scoreboard shows where they look and whether you are cited, nothing more.