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 and 100% free. 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 there is no source-check charge at all: this Actor is FREE, you pay only Apify's own platform usage.

100% free

This Actor is free. No charge per article, no charge per run from us — you pay only Apify's own platform usage, exactly as for an Actor you wrote yourself.

It is free because it costs us nothing: it reads Google News' own public RSS feed. No API key, no scraping, nothing that can be blocked.

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 never pay us for a quiet run. This Actor is free — there is no alert price and no source-check fee. Raw scrapers bill every row of a full re-scan every run; here there's nothing to bill at all.
2. Never billed on a failed source. Since the Actor is free, an outage costs you nothing either way.
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

This Actor is FREE: no charge per article, no source-check fee, no charge per run from us — you pay only Apify's own platform usage, exactly as for an Actor you wrote yourself. It costs us nothing to run because it reads Google News' own public RSS feed directly (no upstream actor, no licensed scraper, no API key), so there is nothing to pass a cost through for.

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

Related scrapers

Same data, other sources — all with the same free tier, the same clean schema and the same pay-only-for-what-you-get billing:

Actor
Reddit Search Scraper - Posts & Mentions by Keyword
Reddit Subreddit Scraper - Posts & Discussions
Hacker News Scraper - Posts & Comments by Keyword
Stack Overflow Scraper - Questions by Tag or Keyword
Quora Scraper - Questions, Answers & Topics
X (Twitter) Search Scraper - Posts by Keyword

All input fields

Every field the Start form accepts, so nothing in the schema is undocumented. Most runs only need the fields already covered above — these are the rest, including advanced/bring-your-own-data options.

• currentItems (Bring your own items (optional)) — Skip the chained fetch and pass records directly (no upstream call, no fetch fee).