What Are People Saying About My Business Online?

One thing to know before you start: everything below is a manual, one-time version of something Tailwind's Mentions tool does automatically, rolling up every mention it finds into a daily digest of everything said about you so you're not stuck repeating these steps yourself every week. Worth keeping in mind as you go — but the manual walkthrough below is still a genuinely useful first step on its own, and it's free, so let's start there.

Start here: search your business name in quotes

Open Google and type your exact business name in quotation marks — for example "Riverside Dental Clinic" rather than just Riverside Dental Clinic. The quotes tell Google to look for that exact phrase instead of loosely matching the words, which cuts out a lot of irrelevant results and surfaces pages that actually mention you by name.

Look through the first two pages of results, not just the first few links. Pay attention to anything that isn't your own website or your Google Business Profile — those are the mentions you don't already know about. If your business has a common name shared with other companies, add your city or neighborhood to the search to narrow it down, like "Riverside Dental Clinic" Austin.

Check the review sites your customers actually use

Your Google Business Profile reviews are probably familiar, since Google tends to notify you about new ones. The ones worth deliberately checking are the sites that don't notify you by default:

• Yelp, especially if you're in food, retail, or personal services — Yelp has its own active user base that may never leave a Google review at all.
• Facebook, if your business has a page — reviews and recommendations there often sit separately from everything else.
• Industry-specific sites relevant to what you do — Tripadvisor for hospitality, Healthgrades for medical practices, Houzz for home services, G2 or Capterra for software. If you're not sure which of these apply to your industry, a quick search for "best [your industry] near me" will usually surface whichever site people in your category actually use.

Search each one directly for your business name rather than relying on Google to have indexed everything — review sites don't always let search engines crawl every page, so a review can exist on the site without showing up in a Google search for your name.

Give yourself a few minutes per site rather than a quick skim. Read the most recent reviews first, since those reflect how things are going right now, and skim a couple of older ones too, just to get a sense of whether the same compliment or complaint keeps coming up. A pattern that repeats across several reviews is worth more than any single one, good or bad.

Check YouTube and Reddit directly

These two are easy to forget, and they're exactly the kind of place a mention can sit for years without you ever finding it through a normal Google search.

On YouTube, search your business name directly in YouTube's own search bar rather than Google — a local reviewer, a "day in the life" vlogger, or a customer filming a haul video might mention or show your business without the video title or description ever saying your name, which means Google may never surface it at all.

On Reddit, search your business name along with your city, since local subreddits are a common place for people to ask for or warn against recommendations — "best plumber in [city]" threads, service recommendation megathreads, or a one-off complaint thread are all places your name might come up without you ever being tagged or notified.

Neither platform is going to ping you when this happens. Reddit doesn't notify businesses about mentions at all, and YouTube only notifies the channel that posted a video, not the business the video happens to be about. That's precisely why a direct, deliberate search on both is worth doing, even though it feels like an unusual place to look for feedback on your business.

Why doing this once helps, and doing it manually every week doesn't

Running through the steps above once is genuinely useful — it gives you a real baseline for what's actually out there about your business, instead of a guess. But doing it again next week, and the week after that, across Google, several review sites, YouTube and Reddit, isn't something most business owners are going to keep up with. New reviews and mentions show up on their own schedule, not yours, and a mention you don't find for three weeks is a mention you couldn't respond to, correct, or even just be aware of for three weeks.

That's the real limit of the manual approach: it's accurate for the moment you run it, and stale again almost immediately. An ongoing version of the same idea — one that checks continuously instead of whenever you remember to — is what turns this from an occasional check into something you can actually rely on. Tailwind's Mentions tool does that automatically, watching review sites, YouTube, Reddit, X, Facebook, TikTok, blogs, news sites, forums and even podcasts, and rolling everything it finds into a daily digest of everything said about you, plus a real-time alert if something urgent or likely to spread turns up.

A good first step before committing to anything

If running through all of the manual steps above feels like a lot for a first attempt, there's a simpler starting point. Tailwind's free reputation scan runs a quick check of your business's online presence with no signup and no account required — a reasonable way to see what's immediately visible before deciding whether ongoing, automated monitoring is worth setting up. Think of it as a faster version of the manual walkthrough above, not a replacement for actually caring about what shows up.

Common questions about checking your online reputation

How do I see what people are saying about my business online for free?

Search your exact business name in quotes on Google, check the review sites relevant to your industry directly, and search YouTube and Reddit using their own search bars rather than relying on Google to have indexed everything. All of this is free and takes about fifteen minutes for a first pass.

Why didn't a review or mention show up when I searched Google?

Google doesn't index every page on every site, and some platforms limit what search engines can crawl at all. A review or forum post can exist and still never appear in a general Google search for your name — which is why checking review sites, YouTube and Reddit directly, using their own search tools, matters as much as the Google search itself.

How often should I check what people are saying about my business?

As often as you can realistically keep up with, which for most owners doing this manually ends up being "rarely, if ever, after the first time." That's not a personal failing — it's just a lot to repeat across several sites on a regular schedule. It's the reason ongoing, automated monitoring exists: to do the repeating part for you.

What should I do if I find a negative mention or review?

Read it carefully before reacting. If it's a legitimate complaint, a calm, specific response addressing what happened goes further than a defensive one. If it's clearly fake, off-topic, or violates a platform's policies, most review sites have a process for reporting it rather than disputing it publicly.