Brand Monitor now has a weekly mention badge you can embed anywhere
Most brand monitoring tools push at you. Digest emails, Slack notifications, spike alerts — the assumption is that you need to be told when something happens. That's useful for high-volume accounts or for teams where someone is actually responsible for responding to mentions.
For indie hackers and solo founders, it's often overkill. You don't need to be notified every time someone mentions your project. You want to be able to glance at something and know whether your presence is growing or shrinking.
Brand Monitor now has a badge for that.
The badge
GET /badge/{user_id} returns an SVG badge showing your weekly mention count across all tracked sources (HN, Reddit, GitHub, News).
The format: 12 mentions/wk
Color and trend indicator:
- Green — flat or growing week-over-week
- Yellow with ↓ — declining week-over-week
The week-over-week comparison is what makes it useful. A raw count of "12 mentions" tells you almost nothing on its own. "12 mentions, down from 18 last week" is signal — something shifted. The badge communicates that without requiring you to log in and pull up a chart.
Embed it in a README:
Or on a Linktree, personal site footer, or status page — anywhere that renders an image URL.
Pull, not push
This is the deliberate design. The badge is pull-based: it serves the current state when something requests the image, which happens when someone loads the page it's on. You don't get notified. You see the state when you happen to look.
Think of it like an RSS reader. You check when you want to check, not when the tool decides you should care. For founders who are already monitoring too many dashboards, one more push channel isn't useful. A badge you glance at while looking at your own README is.
The flip side: if your mentions drop to zero overnight, the badge won't alert you. For that, the weekly digest and spike alerts still exist. The badge and the alerts serve different use cases — ambient awareness vs. actionable notification.
Who this is for
Indie hackers — embed in your project's GitHub README. Visitors see that people are actively talking about your tool without you having to manually update a "mentioned in" section.
Founders — put it in your personal site footer or Linktree. It's a live signal of whether you're maintaining a presence, not just a static "as seen on" list.
Open source maintainers — useful in the same way a download count badge is useful. It signals community activity without requiring the visitor to go looking for it.
Opt-in only
Same model as the CostWatch badge: the endpoint returns 404 unless you enable it. Your mention count might feel innocuous, but a declining trend with a yellow ↓ is the kind of thing you might not want publicly visible while you're working through a rough patch.
Enable via the dashboard or POST /account/badge. The response includes your ready-to-paste embed markdown. Disable with DELETE /account/badge and the endpoint goes dark immediately.
The badge updates when Brand Monitor runs its weekly aggregation. It's not real-time — it's a weekly snapshot with a trend direction, which is the right granularity for this kind of ambient signal.