Which sources does a report read?

The short answer

PollyX searches millions of sources, including global news from 100+ countries; X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, Telegram and Twitch; Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Amazon, the App Store, Google Play, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Airbnb, Yelp, Deliveroo, G2, Capterra, eBay, Etsy and Steam; Hacker News, Substack, Medium, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Product Hunt; Glassdoor, Indeed and kununu; podcasts; and local platforms such as Bilibili and Zhihu in China, PTT in Taiwan, Kaskus in Indonesia, Reclame Aqui and Mercado Libre in Brazil and Zomato in India. Which of them run depends on the brand's industry and market. In more detail - News: the GDELT Project (global news articles from 100+ countries). Video: the YouTube Data API (video reviews, complaints, and thousands of real comments). AI-powered live web search, which scans Trustpilot, Reddit, Glassdoor, forums and more in real time. Social: public posts from X, TikTok and Instagram (fetched directly, filtered for ads and spam), Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon, Telegram public channels, and the replies and comments under the posts we find. Forums and communities: Reddit, Hacker News, local forums such as boards.ie, Substack newsletters and their comments, Medium and Tumblr. Developer communities, for software brands: GitHub issues, Stack Overflow questions and Product Hunt launch comments. Review, app-store and complaint platforms, read in aggregate and never quoted: Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping product ratings, the Apple App Store, Google Play, the Chrome Web Store and the Shopify App Store, Steam reviews for video games, Etsy shop reviews for makers, G2, Capterra, TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights for business software, BBB, PissedConsumer and Sitejabber. For hotel and travel brands, read the same way: Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Expedia and Hotels.com guest reviews, Airbnb listings the brand runs, and Yelp for premises. For restaurant brands: Deliveroo and Zomato outlet ratings. Regional platforms, for reports on their markets: Reclame Aqui complaints in Brazil and Mercado Libre product ratings across Latin America, read in aggregate, and Bilibili videos and Zhihu answers in Chinese-language markets, PTT threads in Taiwan and Kaskus threads in Indonesia, described rather than quoted. Employer reviews, unless you ask for consumer sentiment only: Glassdoor and Indeed, plus kununu in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Investor chatter for listed companies: Stocktwits, described rather than quoted. Podcasts: episode titles and show notes from Apple's podcast index, plus transcripts of the episodes whose title or show names your brand - the publisher's own transcript where the feed carries one, otherwise a machine transcript of up to 25 minutes, which can misrecognise names and numbers and is attributed to the show, never to a named speaker; your own shows are excluded. Attention signals: Google Trends search interest and Wikipedia article activity. Through those indexes the search reaches millions of sources - the same web every monitoring tool sees. Most of it never mentions your brand, and of what does, spam, ads, duplicates and the brand's own marketing are removed before scoring. What survives is what your report actually reads and cites: every source that talks about the brand, after irrelevant, duplicated and spammy items are removed, every one listed and clickable, and every report shows its own exact count on the page.

From millions of sources to the ones that matter

Think of a library with a million books. Ask what they say about your brand and you do not read a million books: only a few hundred mention your brand at all. The rest are about cooking and dinosaurs. We search the whole library; your report reads the shelf that matters.

1. 1Millions of sources searched. News from 100+ countries, X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Amazon, the app stores and local platforms such as Bilibili, PTT and Kaskus: the whole library.
2. 2Most never mention you. For any one brand, only hundreds to a few thousand items actually talk about it. The rest are about something else.
3. 3Junk removed. Spam, ads, duplicates, bots and the brand's own marketing are filtered out before they can touch the score.
4. 4Read, scored and cited. Every surviving source is actually read and weighed, then listed and clickable in your report, which shows its own count.

What decides which sources run

Not every source runs on every report. Developer communities are read for software brands, investor chatter for listed companies, delivery ratings for restaurant brands, regional platforms such as Reclame Aqui, Bilibili, PTT or Kaskus only for reports on their markets, and employer reviews only when you include employee opinions (see Customers only, or employees too?). A report limited to one country reads the sources that can be limited to that country (see Reporting on a single market).

Checking for yourself

The Sources & References section at the end of every report lists each source with a link, so any finding can be traced back to what was actually said. The full method, including what the score cannot tell you, is on the Methodology page.