Google News Monitor — Brand & Topic Alerts (Vigia)

Track Google News for your brand, competitors or topics and get only NEW articles since last check. Charged only on new articles, never per run. Ideal for PR, brand-monitoring and market-intel agents.

100% first-party. This monitor reads the official Google News RSS feed directly — no third-party scraper in the middle. There is no upstream actor that can break, rate-limit, or go dark, and the source check costs just $0.02.

What it does

Track brand or topic coverage and catch a news-velocity spike. You get only what changed since your last check — never a full re-dump to diff yourself.

Why Vigia — 5 advantages a raw scraper can't match

1. You pay the alert price only for real change. New-news story alerts are billed only for genuinely new news stories since your last check. A quiet run bills just the small source-check fee (the cost of looking) — never the alert price on unchanged data. Raw scrapers bill every row of a full re-scan every run.
2. Never billed on a failed source. The source check is charged only when the source actually responded. If it's down, you don't pay for our outage.
3. Append-only delta + spike signal. The first monitored run stores a free baseline; later runs deliver only what's new, plus a velocity-spike alert when volume suddenly surges (trend / review-bomb / hiring-surge).
4. Hard cost cap you control. Set maxTotalChargeUsd and the run can never bill above it — predictable spend, no surprise invoice.
5. Agent-ready output. Clean, normalized rows and a RUN_SUMMARY.json with ready-to-use signals — chainable from any MCP / A2A agent in one step.

Example input

{
  "queries": [
    "your brand",
    "industry topic"
  ],
  "monitorEnabled": true,
  "maxTotalChargeUsd": 1.0
}

Set monitorEnabled: true so the first run stores a free baseline and later runs return only new results. Pin a monitorId to keep separate targets from sharing state.

Output

Each row is a normalized change record: record_id, query_id, title, url, author, published_at, score, text. A RUN_SUMMARY.json accompanies every run with the aggregated signal (counts, velocity spikes, trend).

How you're charged

• News story alert — billed once per new news story since the last check (this is the only charge that scales with change).
• Source check ($0.80) — billed once per monitored target per run, only when the source responded. A failed source is free.
• A quiet run bills only the source check ($0.80), never the alert price. Vigia never scrapes the source itself; it chains a licensed scraper, caps every call, and passes you only the delta.

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Part of the Vigia monitoring suite — change-only billing, outage-safe, agent-ready.