Brand Coverage Tracker: Share of Voice & Search Interest

Who is getting written about, who is getting searched for, and whether the two agree. Enter your brand and its competitors and get share of voice, the outlets behind every number, a day by day timeline, the headlines themselves — and what search interest did over the same period.

Reads Google News in 15 country editions and Google Trends alongside it. No API key, no account, no proxy.

What does this do?

Other news scrapers hand you a pile of articles. A communications team does not need a pile of articles; it needs the answer to "are we winning coverage against our competitors, and who is writing about them instead of us?"

This Actor runs one search per brand, checks each headline really is about that brand, then reports the comparison.

flowchart LR
    A[Your brand +<br/>competitors] --> B[Google News,<br/>one search per brand]
    B --> C[Headline check:<br/>is this really them?]
    C --> D[Share of voice, outlets,<br/>timeline, headlines]

Who is it for?

You are	You use it to
PR and comms teams	Report share of voice against competitors, every week, with the headlines to back it
PR agencies	Show a prospect how little coverage they get next to rivals, then show the improvement
Marketing and brand managers	See which publications cover your category and which ones only cover a competitor
Founders and investors	Track whether a company's news presence is growing or fading
Analysts and researchers	Measure media attention by brand, outlet and market over time

What data do you get?

One row per brand:

Field	Meaning
brand, articles, sharePercent	The brand and its share of all coverage in this comparison
outletCount, topOutlets	How many publications wrote about it, and which wrote most
exclusiveOutlets, exclusiveOutletCount	Outlets covering only this brand and none of its rivals
timeline	Articles per day across the window
busiestDay, busiestDayArticles	The day it made the most news
averageArticlesPerDay, firstArticleAt, lastArticleAt	Pace and range of coverage
topHeadlines	The 10 newest headlines with outlet, date and link
businessContextPercent, nameLooksAmbiguous, ambiguityWarning	Whether the name is really being read as a brand (see below)
headlinesDroppedAsIrrelevant	Loose matches the headline check removed
searchInterestDirection, searchInterestChangePercent	Which way search interest is moving, against the same weeks a year earlier
coverageVsInterest, coverageVsInterestNote	Whether coverage and interest agree, in one line with both numbers
topSearchesAboutBrand, risingSearchesAboutBrand, breakoutSearchesAboutBrand	What people search about the brand, and what is growing fastest
searchInterestByRegion	Where the brand is searched most

Turn on Also return every article as a row for a second table of every article behind the numbers.

The generic name problem, and what this Actor does about it

Google News matches loosely. Search for a design tool called Sketch and you get fashion sketches, comedy sketches and police sketches — and a share of voice that looks respectable and means nothing.

So every brand gets a second search, restricted to business-shaped coverage, and the two are compared. From a real run in September 2026:

Brand	Articles	Share of voice	Business context	Verdict
Figma	95	33.5%	59%	fine
Sketch	88	31.0%	24%	flagged as too generic
Canva	87	30.6%	76%	fine
Adobe Express	14	4.9%	71%	fine

Sketch's 31% is not real coverage, and the Actor says so in the row rather than letting you put it in a report. Fix it with a context word (design) or exclude terms, and run again.

Coverage went up. Did anyone care?

Share of voice answers who got written about. It cannot tell you whether that coverage reached anybody. So every brand is also read on Google Trends over the same run, and the two readings are put side by side.

From one run in September 2026, four design and collaboration tools, 30 day window, US:

Brand	Coverage	Search interest	What it means
Notion	68 articles, +69%	falling 21.6%	coverage rising, interest not following
Miro	67 articles, −59%	rising 42.3%	interest rising without extra coverage
Figma	88 articles, −27.5%	falling 58.3%	coverage and interest both falling
Canva	88 articles, steady	falling 20.3%	coverage holding, interest falling

Notion and Miro are the two rows worth a meeting, and a share of voice table alone shows neither: Notion's best press month in the window moved nothing, while Miro is being searched for far more with no press to explain it.

Interest is compared against the same weeks a year earlier, not against last month, so a seasonal brand is not reported as collapsing every January. The default five year window leaves thirteen weeks on each side of that comparison; a twelve month window leaves two, which swings hard on a brand name.

What people are searching about the brand

risingSearchesAboutBrand is the useful one. In the run above Figma's fastest growing searches were figma dev mode, figma share price, figma stock price and figma ipo date, and Canva's were canva ai generator and canva ai — two very different stories, neither of them visible in a headline count.

Google's related list drifts off the brand: a run on Notion returned "walmart near me" as a breakout, and Canva returned the fragment "can". A search is only reported here if it carries a word from the brand name, matched on whole words so that "can" cannot pass for "Canva".

Turn the whole section off with Also measure search interest if you only want the press numbers. It is free either way: Trends costs no extra charge and adds a few seconds per brand.

Example: Figma vs Canva vs Adobe Express

Same run, 30 day window, US edition. Figma led on volume, but Canva reached more publications (47 outlets to Figma's 41) and had 40 outlets that covered it and no rival. Adobe Express, despite the biggest parent company, took under 5% of the conversation.

How to use it

1. Add your brands, one per line: your own first, then competitors.
2. If a name is an ordinary word, add a context word such as software or bank.
3. Pick a time window and the news market you care about.
4. Leave Also measure search interest on to get the coverage-versus-interest line.
5. Run it, then export to CSV, Excel or JSON, or chart the timeline field.

Run it on a schedule with the same brands to watch share of voice move week by week.

Popular comparisons

Ready to run examples, each one a real media comparison:

• Figma vs Canva vs Adobe Express: News Coverage
• Slack vs Microsoft Teams vs Zoom: News Coverage
• Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: News Coverage
• Stripe vs PayPal vs Adyen: News Coverage
• OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Google Gemini: News Coverage
• Tesla vs Rivian vs Lucid: News Coverage
• Nike vs Adidas vs Puma: News Coverage
• Netflix vs Disney+ vs HBO Max: News Coverage
• Uber vs Lyft vs DoorDash: News Coverage
• Coinbase vs Binance vs Kraken: News Coverage
• Revolut vs Monzo vs Starling: UK News Coverage
• Airbnb vs Booking.com vs Expedia: News Coverage
• Spotify vs Apple Music vs YouTube Music: Coverage
• Samsung vs iPhone vs Google Pixel: News Coverage
• Zomato vs Swiggy: India News Coverage

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.02 per brand report, plus $0.0002 per article row ($0.20 per 1,000) only if you ask for the article table. A four-brand comparison costs about 8 cents.

Where the data comes from

The public Google News RSS search, in 15 country and language editions. Coverage counts are of articles Google News indexed in the window you choose, which is what every media monitoring tool measures.

Search interest comes from Google Trends, read for each brand at the same time. Trends numbers are relative (0–100 against the brand's own peak), never absolute search volumes — so the direction and the percentage change are what this Actor reports, and it says which weeks each one was measured against.

FAQ

Do I need a key or a Google account? No. The feed is public.

How many articles per brand? Google News returns at most 100 per search, so that is the cap. For a busy brand, use a shorter window to see recent coverage more precisely.

Is sentiment included? No. Honest sentiment scoring needs a language model, which would mean an API key and a setup step, so this Actor does not pretend to do it. You get volume, outlets, timing and the headlines, and can read the headlines yourself.

Why do two brands sometimes share an outlet count but not the same outlets? exclusiveOutlets shows exactly that: the publications covering one brand and none of the others in your comparison. It is usually the most actionable column, because it is your pitch list.

Does it read the full article text? No, it reads the headline, outlet, date and link from the feed. That keeps it fast, free of proxies, and it is what coverage counting needs.