News Finder & Monitor

Google Alerts, but structured, automatable, and API-first.

Find fresh mentions for companies, competitors, people, products, and topics — without scraping full article pages.

This Actor is built for fast brand and competitor news monitoring. It reads RSS/Atom feeds, creates Google News RSS searches from your queries, dedupes results, and returns clean rows with headline, source, date, URL, snippet, matched queries, and discovery metadata.

Why use this Actor?

Most news scrapers try to fetch full articles and run into paywalls, publisher blocks, browser costs, and messy article extraction. This Actor does the simpler, more reliable job first:

Find the news. Normalize it. Dedupe it. Export it. Monitor it.

Use it for:

• Brand and company mention monitoring
• Competitor/news tracking
• PR and press-release discovery
• Product launch monitoring
• Investor and market intelligence
• Daily AI/news brief inputs
• n8n/Make/Zapier/Sheets/Notion news workflows

Sources supported

Query search

If useGoogleNewsRss is enabled, every query becomes a Google News RSS search feed.

Example query: OpenAI acquisition

Built-in source presets

Preset	Sources
tech_news	BBC Technology, NYT Technology, NPR Technology
world_news	BBC World, Guardian World, NYT World, NPR News
business_finance	NYT Business, NPR Business, SEC press releases
press_releases	PRNewswire, BusinessWire, SEC press releases
launch_startup	Hacker News frontpage, Product Hunt feed
science_space	NASA releases, NASA Science, ScienceDaily science/space

You can also add any RSS/Atom URL in customFeeds.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["OpenAI", "AI agents", "Apify"],
  "sourcePresets": ["tech_news", "press_releases", "launch_startup"],
  "customFeeds": [],
  "useGoogleNewsRss": true,
  "googleNewsLocale": "hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en",
  "maxItemsPerSource": 25,
  "sinceHours": 168,
  "dedupeMode": "url_or_title_source",
  "requireQueryMatch": false,
  "includeSnippetHtml": false
}

Input options

Field	Type	What it does
queries	array	Keywords/companies/topics to search and match
sourcePresets	array	Built-in feed bundles to scan
customFeeds	array	Extra RSS/Atom feed URLs
useGoogleNewsRss	boolean	Generates Google News RSS search feeds from queries
googleNewsLocale	string	Google News locale params, e.g. hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
maxItemsPerSource	integer	Caps how many items are inspected per source
sinceHours	integer	Keeps only recent results when feed dates are available
dedupeMode	enum	url, url_or_title_source, or title_only
requireQueryMatch	boolean	Filters preset/custom feeds to rows matching your queries
includeSnippetHtml	boolean	Includes raw feed snippet HTML for debugging

Output fields

Field	Description
query	Query that generated the row, if from Google News RSS
title	News headline/feed item title
sourceName	Feed/source name
sourceType	google_news, preset name, or custom_feed
sourceFeedUrl	RSS/Atom feed URL used
publishedAt	Published timestamp if available
url	Original article/result URL
snippet	Clean feed snippet/summary
matchedQueries	Queries found in title/snippet/source, or source query
rank	Position in the source feed
discoveredAt	Actor discovery timestamp
dedupeKey	Stable key used for dedupe/debugging

Example output

{
  "query": "OpenAI",
  "title": "OpenAI announces new partnership...",
  "sourceName": "Google News",
  "sourceType": "google_news",
  "sourceFeedUrl": "https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=OpenAI&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-03T12:30:00Z",
  "url": "https://example.com/news/openai-partnership",
  "snippet": "OpenAI announced...",
  "matchedQueries": ["OpenAI"],
  "rank": 1,
  "discoveredAt": "2026-07-03T12:35:00Z",
  "dedupeKey": "..."
}

Ready-made monitoring templates

Use these patterns directly in Apify Tasks or schedules:

Daily Brand Monitor

Track your company/product/founder plus related terms every 24 hours.

{
  "queries": ["Apify", "Crawlee", "Apify MCP"],
  "sourcePresets": ["tech_news", "press_releases", "launch_startup"],
  "useGoogleNewsRss": true,
  "maxItemsPerSource": 25,
  "sinceHours": 24
}

Daily Competitor Monitor

Track competitors, funding, launches, and market narrative shifts.

{
  "queries": ["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Google Gemini", "Perplexity AI"],
  "sourcePresets": ["tech_news", "business_finance", "press_releases", "launch_startup"],
  "useGoogleNewsRss": true,
  "maxItemsPerSource": 20,
  "sinceHours": 24
}

Startup Launch Monitor

Track Product Hunt, Hacker News, launch chatter, and press releases.

{
  "queries": ["launch", "startup", "Product Hunt", "AI startup"],
  "sourcePresets": ["launch_startup", "tech_news", "press_releases"],
  "useGoogleNewsRss": true,
  "maxItemsPerSource": 30,
  "sinceHours": 48
}

Cost and speed

This Actor only reads RSS/Atom feeds. It does not open browsers or fetch full article pages, so runs are usually fast and low-cost.

Cost drivers:

• Number of queries
• Number of presets/custom feeds
• maxItemsPerSource

Limitations

• It finds news items; it does not extract full article body text.
• Some feeds provide short snippets only.
• Google News result URLs may point through Google redirect URLs depending on feed format.
• Feed availability and timestamps depend on the source.
• This Actor is not a substitute for licensed news databases.

Legal and responsible use

This Actor reads public RSS/Atom feeds and returns metadata/snippets those feeds expose. You are responsible for complying with source terms, copyright rules, and downstream use policies.

Suggested workflows

• Schedule daily runs for brand/company monitoring.
• Export to Google Sheets or Notion for a news dashboard.
• Send new rows to Slack/Telegram/email via webhook automation.
• Pair with a separate full-article extractor only for selected URLs that matter.

Changelog

• 0.1 — Initial release: Google News RSS query feeds, source presets, custom feeds, dedupe, snippets, freshness filter, local/cloud storage support.