Know what was said about your client — before they ask

Set up one tracker per thing you are responsible for: the client, the spokesperson, the product, the competitors, and the issue. Each tracker is a saved search that keeps watching new episodes and videos as they publish, across 150,000+ podcasts and YouTube channels. You are told what was said — you do not have to listen to the shows to find out.

1. Describe what you want to track. Type the name, or describe it in a sentence — “the UK self-tanning brand stocked in Boots”, a spokesperson, a competitor, a category. The search planner turns that into the subject, its named parts, or the category, checks each phrase against what has actually been said, and adds the spellings speech-to-text tends to produce. You can edit the terms before you save them.
2. Add context, so the right name wins. A short description of who or what you mean is checked against every mention. “Ed” stays Ed Sheeran rather than every Ed on air, a common surname stays on your client, and spoken variants still catch the mention when the name is spelled the way it sounds.
3. Save it as a tracker. The tracker keeps watching. Filter it by podcast or YouTube and by positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, and edit its terms as the story, the client list, or the competitor set changes.
4. Get told, then check the evidence. Every mention arrives with the sentence that was said — never reworded — the show or channel, and the timestamp, with podcast audio on a seekable timeline or the YouTube video at that moment. If anyone queries it, the proof is already there.

The trackers a PR team usually runs side by side:

The first search is free, with no credit card. The trailing 30 days are generally available within 24 hours of signup, so you can see what was already said before you commit to watching what comes next.

Earned media is what someone else chose to say about you, in their own words, on a show or channel you do not own and did not write. A host recommending you, a guest criticising you, a creator reviewing the product on camera, a rival being named instead of you — that is the coverage a PR team is judged on, and on podcasts and YouTube it is spoken, not written.

That is why your current stack misses it. Google Alerts, Mention, and Meltwater read news, blogs, and social posts. They never hear the episode or the video, so a spoken recommendation, a damaging aside, and a competitor comparison all pass without a trace. You usually hear about them the way everyone does: the client mentions it, a colleague pings you, or it surfaces in a meeting you were not prepared for.

You’ve Been Mentioned watches that audio as it publishes and aims to surface a mention within minutes of publish, processing times varying by source. A paid host-read still counts — it was still said, on that show, to that audience. Podcasts and YouTube are the sources. TikTok, Twitch, and Kick are not; TikTok is on the roadmap.

A list of hits does not tell a client anything. Competitors hand you thousands of disconnected snippets and leave you to read them. Here, the research assistant sits beside the mention feed on every tracker, and you interrogate the coverage in plain language. It synthesises what hundreds of shows are saying, and every point it makes cites the exact sentence, show, and timestamp behind it — so a claim you repeat to a client is one you can open and verify.

Questions PR teams ask of a tracker:

• What are hosts and creators actually criticising about the launch?
• How are we being compared with our main competitor — and who comes off better?
• Is this criticism one show, or is the same point spreading across several?
• What changed in the conversation this week, and which shows drove it?
• What do people keep asking for that we have not answered yet?

Beside the conversation, the tracker’s analytics show total mentions, unique shows, the sentiment split, the trend over time, and the top sources — the numbers behind the narrative. When volume jumps, you can move from the spike to the synthesis to the cited quote in the same view, instead of reconstructing the story from memory after the moment has passed.

Choose which moments on each tracker should email you, and those — only those — send an alert. Every match from one check arrives in a single email, you set the gap between alerts from 30 minutes to 24 hours, and office hours can hold an email until your working window opens. Everything that does not match a moment you chose waits for one summary, daily or weekly. The weekly summary arrives on Monday at 9am in your timezone, including on the free tier. Alerts require a subscription.

That is the difference between being asked “did you see what they said about us?” and already having the quote, the show, and the timestamp in your inbox — with the moment ready to play before you reply.

Forward the summary, or turn the period into a report. Reports are included with a subscription and can be generated on demand or scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly. They are delivered as an email, opened in the in-app viewer, or shared as a public link that opens without an account and expires after 30 days — and saved as a PDF when the client wants a file.

• Executive summary: the narrative of what was said, headline numbers, top shows, the sentiment breakdown, and highlighted quotes — the client update you would otherwise write from scratch on a Monday morning.
• Competitive comparison: your tracker beside the competitors’, with side-by-side metrics, volume overlaid, and comparative share of voice — the answer to “how did we do against them?”, with the quotes behind the numbers.

For individual moments, bookmark a mention with a personal note and file it in a colour-coded collection — launch coverage, criticism to answer, endorsements to amplify. A single clip can be shared as a public link that expires after 7 days and unfurls when pasted into Slack, so a stakeholder hears the sentence itself rather than your summary of it. The quote is never reworded, in the report or anywhere else.

The same trackers that protect a reputation also show you where to go next. A show that has already covered your category — or spent an episode comparing your competitor — has told you the angle it cares about. A guest who explained the exact problem your client solves has given you the sentence to open with. A host who praised the product unprompted has an audience that already trusts their recommendation.

• A show to pitch: episodes covering the category or a competitor, so the pitch starts from the position they already took.
• A person to write to: a guest or creator who described the problem in their own words, so your note quotes them, not a press release.
• A voice to work with: a host or channel that mentioned the product favourably, whose listeners are the audience you want to reach again.
• A campaign to inform: the questions, objections, and frustrations coming up across the category tracker become the next brief, message, or piece of content.

None of that requires a separate research project. It is the by-product of trackers you are already running for the client, the spokesperson, the competitors, and the issue.

The first search is free, with no credit card. Standard is £99 a month billed monthly, or £995 a year billed yearly — £83 a month, a saving of £193 against paying monthly. Standard is one account with unlimited search across podcasts and YouTube, instant mention alerts, and reports. On the free tier you can run typed searches, AI-planned searches, and research questions, and the weekly summary still arrives.

Enterprise is custom: everything in Standard, plus unlimited alerts, tailor-made reports, and a dedicated account manager — the conversation for an agency or organisation watching several brands or clients at once. The same prices and limits are in pricing. Start with the free search on your own client, spokesperson, or competitor, and judge it on what was actually said.

• Podcast mentions
• YouTube mentions
• Pricing