Gulf Business News Monitor (Arabic & English)

Get only the new Gulf business stories that mention your companies and topics

Track Saudi, UAE, and wider GCC business news from publisher RSS feeds in Arabic and English. Add the company names, topics, and sectors you care about. Each run returns only the new headlines that match, with links to the original articles, the publisher's own summary, GCC country tags, and the same story merged when several outlets publish it.

Built for: communications and PR teams, investor relations, market and competitive intelligence analysts, and sales teams following accounts in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the GCC. It also fits AI agents that need a clean, deduplicated Gulf news feed.

What you get

• A verified Gulf publisher catalog of 13 feeds that were live and allowed by robots.txt when checked on 2026-10-17: Saudi Gazette, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, The National (all and business), Asharq Al-Awsat (English and الشرق الأوسط), سكاي نيوز عربية, BBC عربي, Wamda, News of Bahrain, Oman Observer, and Fast Company Middle East.
• Your own feeds too: company newsrooms, regulators, and trade publications that publish RSS or Atom.
• Arabic-aware keyword matching: diacritics and spelling variants (أ/إ/ا, ى/ي, ة/ه) are ignored, and attached prefixes are handled, so أرامكو matches وأرامكو and لأرامكو, and اقتصاد matches للاقتصاد. English matches whole words (AI does not match "said"); add * for prefixes (IPO* matches "IPOs").
• New stories only: the monitor remembers what it returned, so scheduled runs deliver each story once.
• Merged coverage: the same story from several publishers (same URL or same headline) becomes one record with alsoPublishedBy.
• GCC tagging and filters: stories are tagged with the GCC countries they mention (English and Arabic place names), and can be filtered by country, language, and age.
• Run summary: per-feed status, keyword counts, and country counts in RUN_SUMMARY.

Quick start

1. Keep the default publishers or pick your own under Publisher feeds. Add extra RSS/Atom URLs under Additional feeds.
2. Add Keywords and company names in either language, for example Aramco, أرامكو, PIF, صندوق الاستثمارات العامة, fintech, IPO*.
3. Optionally set Countries (for example Saudi Arabia) and Exclude keywords (for example football, كرة القدم).
4. Run it, then save it as a task with a schedule (for example every 2 hours) and connect a webhook or integration for alerts.

Example input

{
    "presets": ["saudi-gazette", "gulf-news", "the-national-business", "asharq-al-awsat-ar", "sky-news-arabia"],
    "feedUrls": [],
    "keywords": ["Aramco", "أرامكو", "PIF", "صندوق الاستثمارات العامة", "fintech", "IPO*"],
    "excludeKeywords": ["football", "كرة القدم"],
    "countries": ["SA", "AE"],
    "languages": [],
    "maxAgeHours": 48,
    "onlyNew": true,
    "monitorId": "saudi-ipo-watch",
    "maxItems": 300
}

Input reference

Field	Default	What it does
presets	7 Gulf feeds	Catalog feeds to read.
feedUrls	[]	Extra public RSS/Atom feed URLs. Up to 50 feeds per run in total.
keywords	[]	Keep stories whose headline or summary contains any term (whole words; * suffix for prefixes). Empty keeps all.
excludeKeywords	[]	Drop stories containing any of these.
countries	[]	Keep stories that mention a selected GCC country or come from a publisher based there.
languages	[]	en, ar, or both (detected from the headline).
maxAgeHours	48	Ignore stories older than this; 0 disables. Undated stories are kept.
onlyNew	false	Return only stories this monitor has not returned before. Turn on for scheduled alerts.
monitorId	auto	Name of the history. When empty it is derived from feeds and filters, so changing them starts a fresh history.
maxItems	300	Maximum stories saved per run, newest first. Each saved story is one billable result.
maxItemsPerFeed	100	Items read from each feed before filtering.
includeSummary	true	Include the publisher's feed summary (up to 500 characters).

Output

{
    "itemId": "5cee5a23218901eff2cd1db05e285407",
    "title": "لماذا لا تنعكس التصنيفات الإيجابية للاقتصاد المصري على وضع الجنيه؟",
    "url": "https://aawsat.com/node/5330599",
    "publisher": "الشرق الأوسط",
    "feedId": "asharq-al-awsat-ar",
    "feedUrl": "https://aawsat.com/feed",
    "sourceCountry": "",
    "language": "ar",
    "publishedAt": "2026-10-17T16:06:56.000Z",
    "summary": "…the publisher's own feed summary, up to 500 characters…",
    "categories": ["شمال افريقيا"],
    "imageUrl": "https://static.example-cdn.com/image.webp",
    "countries": [],
    "matchedKeywords": ["اقتصاد"],
    "alsoPublishedBy": [],
    "isNew": true,
    "firstSeenAt": "2026-10-17T16:39:10.067Z",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T16:39:10.067Z"
}

RUN_SUMMARY (default key-value store) lists each feed's status (ok, failed, or blocked-by-robots) with its error, items read, matching and stored counts, plus totals, keyword counts, and country counts.

Use it from code, n8n, Make, or an AI agent

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pharaoh_data~gulf-business-news-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keywords":["Aramco","أرامكو"],"countries":["SA"],"monitorId":"aramco-alerts"}'

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('pharaoh_data/gulf-business-news-monitor').call({
    keywords: ['PIF', 'صندوق الاستثمارات العامة'],
    monitorId: 'pif-watch',
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

• Alerts: schedule a task and add a webhook on "Run succeeded" that posts new stories to Slack, Teams, or email (n8n, Make, and Zapier all have Apify integrations).
• AI agents (MCP): connect https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=pharaoh_data/gulf-business-news-monitor so an agent can fetch fresh Gulf headlines as a tool.

Responsible use and limits

• The Actor reads RSS and Atom feeds only. It returns headlines, links, the publisher's own feed summary, categories, and image links. It never downloads article pages or full article text, and it does not collect author bylines.
• robots.txt is always checked for every feed and redirect; disallowed feeds are reported as blocked-by-robots. Redirects are followed only within the same site, at most three times. Each host is contacted at most once per second, or slower if robots.txt sets a crawl delay. There are no proxies, logins, or challenge-solving.
• Feeds behind bot protection are left out of the catalog because they refuse automated clients. These include Arab News, Zawya, Al Arabiya, Arabian Business, and Gulf Business. No catalog feed currently covers Qatar or Kuwait; add publisher feeds you are permitted to use with feedUrls.
• Publishers own their content. Feeds are generally offered for reading and linking. Before republishing headlines or summaries, using them commercially beyond internal monitoring, or using them for AI training, check each publisher's terms and get a license where needed.
• Matching is lexical, not semantic, and Arabic prefix handling can occasionally over-match short words. Use specific terms and excludeKeywords.
• History is kept for 30 days in your account's named key-value store gulf-news-monitor-state, under monitor-<monitorId>.

Pricing

Pay per event: you pay per saved story (one dataset record), plus Apify's small Actor start event. "Only new stories" keeps scheduled runs cheap because already-delivered stories are not saved or charged. See the Pricing tab for current amounts. A typical run reads 13 feeds in about 20 seconds with 256 MB of memory.

FAQ

Why did a feed fail? Publishers change feed URLs or add bot protection. RUN_SUMMARY shows the error for each feed, and the other feeds still run.

Can I monitor a regulator or a company newsroom? Yes, if it publishes RSS or Atom and its robots.txt allows it. Add the URL under feedUrls.

Does it translate or summarize? No. It returns the publisher's own headline and summary in the original language.