Mention Limits

Understand what counts toward your monthly mention quota, why your feed shows less than your counter, and how to reduce mention burn.

Every Octolens plan includes a monthly mention quota. Once you’ve used it, new mentions are paused until your next billing cycle.

What counts toward your limit

Every post Octolens pulls in for your keywords counts as one mention, whether the AI later marks it as relevant or not relevant.

That’s why your mentions used counter (in the sidebar and in Settings → Plans & Billing) is almost always higher than what you see in your feeds or Dashboard. By default, your feeds and the Dashboard chart show only relevant mentions, so low-relevance posts are filtered out of view but still count against your quota.

This way you don’t get spam in your inbox and we do the heavy lifting for you.

To see everything that’s been pulled in:

1. Open the Dashboard

   From the sidebar.

2. Switch the Mentions over time chart to Relevance

   The breakdown control in the top right of the chart. You’ll see how the bars split between relevant and not-relevant mentions.

3. Filter by keyword

   Use the keyword picker above the chart to see which keywords are driving the most volume.

Keyword context doesn’t reduce mention intake. The Keyword context field in Keyword Settings helps the AI decide what’s relevant, but it does not stop posts from being pulled in. To reduce mention usage, use the include/exclude rules below.

How mention intake works

When you first sign up and choose keywords during onboarding, Octolens looks back 7 days and pulls historical posts per platform. For any new keyword you add after onboarding, we also go back 7 days.

For onboarding and new keywords we do not count the initial mentions to your monthly quota. However, after the initial onboarding every new post we find we count. Each post counts as one mention toward your monthly quota.

Watch broad keywords during onboarding. Check in the All mentions view after onboarding how many posts are being pulled in to get a sense of if there is too much volume for your plan. Then you can make edits. More on that below.

Reduce your mention burn

If a keyword is using up too much of your quota, open its Keyword Settings from the Keywords page (click Edit on its row) and use any of the following:

• Posts must ALSO include (ANY OF / ALL OF). Require additional terms alongside your primary keyword. E.g. Cursor ANY OF coding, AI, IDE filters out posts about computer mice.
• Negative terms. Exclude posts that contain certain words. E.g. Cursor NOT mouse, click.
• Negative authors. Exclude posts from specific accounts: your own company accounts, employees, or known noisy posters.
• Wildcard negative terms. Exclude patterns like beta.* to filter out version strings or substrings.
• Exact match. Make sure this is on for common-word brands so partial matches don’t pull in unrelated posts.
• Case sensitive. Turn it on for acronyms (e.g. RAG) so you don’t catch every use of the lowercase word.

For account-wide cleanup that applies to every keyword, use Global Keyword Settings for negative terms, negative authors, allowed subreddits, excluded subreddits, and excluded GitHub repositories.

You can also pause any noisy keyword from its row on the Keywords page. The keyword stays in your workspace, but stops pulling new mentions until you resume it.

What happens when you run out

When you hit your monthly mention limit, new mentions are paused. You have two options:

• Turn on Flex mentions. Go to Settings → Plans & Billing and enable Flex mentions for usage-based overflow. You only pay for what you use, no plan upgrade needed.
• Upgrade your plan. Switch to a higher monthly quota at Plans & Billing.

Edge cases worth knowing

Deleted keywords still count this cycle. Mentions pulled in this billing cycle from a keyword you’ve since deleted still count against your quota, but they won’t appear on the Dashboard, which only shows your active keywords. This can make Dashboard totals look lower than your “mentions used” counter.

Your own company posts can count. If posts you publish yourself are matching your keyword, they count too. Add your handles as Negative authors in Keyword Settings (or globally in Global Keyword Settings) to exclude them.

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Why am I not getting mentions?

This is a different question from running out of quota. If you’re seeing zero or very few mentions but your counter has plenty of headroom, it’s almost always a keyword setup issue.

1. Incorrect use of “Posts must ALSO include” (ANY OF / ALL OF)

The most frequent cause. If you’ve added include terms, Octolens only searches for posts where your primary keyword appears together with the additional terms. It does not look for the primary keyword alone.

Common pitfalls:

• ALL OF instead of ANY OF. ALL OF requires every extra term to appear in the post. This is very strict and usually works best with just one extra term.
• Exact match on additional terms. Each extra term must appear in the post exactly as written.
• Quotation marks. Writing "AI" looks for the literal text with quotes. Don’t quote.
• Comma-separated, not space-separated. Use ai, AI, artificial intelligence not ai AI artificial intelligence.
• Don’t repeat your primary keyword as an extra term. That requires the term to appear twice in the same post.
• Broad primaries with AND/OR. Due to API limitations, very broad primary keywords (e.g. Brand, Hiring, Strategy) combined with extra terms may miss posts. Use a narrower primary keyword instead.

2. You’ve reached your monthly mention limit

If you’ve hit your quota, new mentions are paused. See What happens when you run out.

3. Keyword spelling or formatting errors

Check your keyword for typos, accidental quotation marks, or special characters.

4. Case sensitivity is turned on

If Case sensitive is enabled in Keyword Settings, only exact-case matches will be shown. Unless you’re monitoring an acronym (e.g. RAG) or a case-specific brand, we recommend keeping it off.

5. Broad keywords may hit platform/API limits

Some platforms and APIs cap the volume of results we can return when a keyword is too broad. Narrowing your keyword (e.g. brand tracking tool instead of brand) gives more relevant and consistent results.

See Tracked Platforms for platform-specific limitations.

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We’re happy to review your keywords and settings together. Email [e-mail] or write in the in-app chat. You can also book a 15-minute call with Charlotte and we’ll do it live.