Track the phrases your buyers post

The other agents wait for someone to touch content you watch. Keyword tracking does not: it searches public LinkedIn posts for phrases you choose, and the person who wrote a matching post becomes the lead.

Add keywords

1. Create the keyword agent

   On Agents (/agents), choose New agent, then Keyword Tracker. There is one keyword agent per workspace, and it holds all your keywords. Keywords cannot be saved until it exists.

2. Type each phrase

   Press Enter or a comma after each keyword. Each one can be up to 85 characters, LinkedIn’s search limit. Quotes and AND, OR, and NOT are allowed, so "looking for" CRM for sales teams is one valid keyword.

3. Or let Embers suggest them

   Suggest from your ICP turns what you sell and the buying signals in your ICP into search phrases. Add the ones that fit and edit the rest.

4. Choose Activate keyword agent

   The agent starts its first search. The button stays disabled while a keyword in the list is flagged as too broad.

To add or remove keywords later, use any of these:

• Tracked keywords on the agent’s details on Agents.
• Watchlist (/watchlist), then Add monitor, then Keywords. Before keyword tracking is on, it asks for one Phrase: choose Track and your first keyword turns it on, with “Tracking” and the phrase to confirm. A keyword row’s Manage opens the same tab.
• The Keywords page (/keywords), which shows “4 of 10” against your cap. It is not in the sidebar; open it from the command palette. See pages the sidebar does not list.

At the cap the Keywords page reads “Plan limit reached. Remove a keyword or upgrade your plan to add more.”

To send a keyword’s new leads to a list, use the list icon on its chip under Tracked keywords (on Agents and on the Keywords page), or New leads go to in its row menu on the Watchlist. The chip shows the list’s name once one is picked. See fill a list automatically.

Pick keywords that find buyers

A keyword search returns any post containing the term, including jokes, news shares, and competitors selling the same thing. The phrasing decides whether the agent is useful or noisy.

• Write buyer language, not seller language. “Looking for”, “recommend”, “alternative to”, and “switching from” are what a person in-market writes. Your category slogan is what your competitors write.
• Name the pain, not the industry. “Manual data entry” beats “operations”. “ERP migration” beats “software”.
• Use competitor names, paired with switching words where you can.
• Avoid single broad words. Marketing, sales, SaaS, AI, hiring, growth, and similar words are flagged in the modal because they “will surface mostly unrelated posts (and run up cost)”.
• Quote exact phrases when a loose match would drag in the wrong conversation.

What Embers does with a match

Every 24 hours the agent searches each active keyword on its own. The first search for a new keyword covers the past month, up to 25 posts. Later searches cover the gap since the last one: 10 posts per keyword after a day, rising to 25 after a week or more. See what the first scan reads.

Matched posts then go through a relevance check before anyone reaches your queue:

• Noise is dropped. Recruiter and staffing job ads, incidental mentions, news shares with no personal stake, and competitors promoting their own offer are marked not relevant and never become leads.
• Each surviving post is labelled. It gets a match strength (Strong match, Partial match, or Low match), an intent such as Exploring solutions, Seeking recommendation, or Pain point, and a one sentence reason.
• Buying signals lift it. A post that names one of your ICP buying signals gets a 1.5 times boost.
• Only the author is scored. Relevant authors are matched against your ICP, enriched, and scored. Reactions and comments on the post are not fetched.

Keyword matches appear on the Posts page under Keywords. Opening one shows the author and a Why it matched button, which takes you to the Keywords page, where each matched post shows its strength, intent, and reason.

Removing a keyword stops future searches and frees a slot. The posts it already matched stay attached to their leads.

Troubleshooting

• “Set up the keyword tracking agent before adding keywords.” You tried to add a keyword from the Watchlist before creating the agent. Create it on Agents first.
• “Each keyword must be 85 characters or fewer (LinkedIn search limit).” Shorten the phrase or split it into two keywords.
• Matches keep arriving that you would never message. The keyword is too loose. Quote the phrase, add a pain or product word, or remove it.
• No matches at all. A very specific phrase may not appear in a month of public posts. Loosen it slightly, and check no leads in your queue yet.

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