Quickstart
BackTalk watches where developers talk (Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow, YouTube, Bluesky and more) and surfaces every mention of your keywords as a signal you can triage in one inbox. It also measures your AI share of voice: whether Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend you when someone asks a buying question.
This page takes you from nothing to a working feed in a few minutes.
1. Sign in
Open the app and sign in with Google. The first sign-in creates your workspace: your own keywords, inbox, and settings, private to you until you invite anyone.
2. Add your first keyword
Go to Keywords (from the inbox, use Manage keywords) and add one:
- Phrase is the concept to watch, such as
paypal sdk. - Variants are the other ways people write it (spellings and handles like
paypal-jsor@paypal). They do not count as extra keywords, though each variant runs its own search per platform. - Exclude terms drop mentions you never want (for example
hiring, job).
In a hurry? Paste a URL into Suggest keywords from a link (your site, docs, or a GitHub repo) and BackTalk proposes brand-shaped candidates you can add with one click.
See Keywords and watchers for the full setup, including grouping keywords into watchers.
3. Run the first sync
A new keyword kicks off its own first sweep right away and backfills the last 7 days. Out of the box that covers Hacker News, dev.to and GitHub; most other platforms switch on once you add their key, and Bluesky is enabled by the deployment operator (see What BackTalk watches). You can also press Sync now whenever you need fresh results; each plan includes a daily allowance of manual syncs (see Plans).
4. Triage your inbox
Open the Inbox. New mentions land in the Inbox view, each with a sentiment chip. Work through them:
- Mark seen, Replied, or Ignore… (with a reason that trains the filter), and star anything worth coming back to.
- Filter by source, watcher, keyword, sentiment and more from the left rail, or search the text.
Full details in Inbox and triage.
Next steps
- Add an AI key in Settings → AI to upgrade sentiment, category and priority from the free offline scorer to a real model, and to unlock AI visibility.
- Turn on more platforms with their keys in Settings → Platform keys (which ones need a key).
- Cut the noise with global ignore lists.
- Get the digest by email (notifications) or pushed to Slack, Discord or a webhook.
- Share the picture with the report and recap image.
- Invite your team on the Business plan (managing members).