Google News Monitor: Brand & Topic Alerts, Only New Articles

Who it's for: PR teams, agencies, founders and analysts who want a news alert feed for brands, companies or topics without re-reading the same headlines every day.

What you get: For each query, Google News articles with title, source, publish time and original link. Scheduled runs return only articles that are new since the last run of the same Monitor ID. Metadata only: no article text is scraped.

Price: $0.004 per query checked + $0.002 per new article returned + $0.005 once per run. First-run baseline articles are free (the query check is charged); failed or timed-out queries are free.

Made by SteadyScrape (steady-scrape).

What you can do with it

1. Brand monitoring. Watch your company and product names; get only new coverage each morning.
2. Competitor & industry watch. Track competitors or topics (e.g. "electric vehicles") per country and language.
3. Alerts into your tools. Schedule it in Apify and send new rows to Slack, email, Make, Zapier or n8n with an Apify integration or webhook.
4. One-off news search. Mode oneOff returns the current top results without memory.

How "only new" works

• Each Monitor ID keeps a memory per query + location + language (stored in your Apify account, named store google-news-monitor-state).
• First run: records a baseline and returns no article rows (turn on Return current articles on the first run to get them).
• Later runs: an article is new if its link (normalised: tracking parameters, www./AMP variants removed) or its title on the same site hasn't been seen before.
• A query that fails or times out doesn't update the memory, so its articles come back on the next run.
• Use a different Monitor ID per schedule or client. Running the same Monitor ID twice at the same time can produce duplicates.
• Memory keeps the latest 5,000 articles per query.

Input

{
  "queries": ["OpenAI", "\"electric vehicles\""],
  "mode": "monitor",
  "monitorId": "daily-brand-watch",
  "location": "United States",
  "language": "en",
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 10
}

• queries: plain words or "exact phrases" (advanced operators like site: are rejected).
• maxResultsPerQuery: top results checked per query (10 = one page, max 100).
• excludeDomains: drop publishers you don't want.
• mock: test mode with sample data, never charged.

Finance preset: company & stock news by ticker

Track news for the companies in a watchlist or portfolio. Add financeCompanies, one per line as TICKER: Company name:

{ "financeCompanies": ["AAPL: Apple", "TSLA: Tesla", "NVDA: Nvidia"], "mode": "monitor", "monitorId": "portfolio-news" }

• Each company becomes one Google News query ("Apple" stock) and is billed as one query checked, like any other query. 3 companies = 3 queries.
• Article rows and the run summary carry ticker and company, so you can route alerts per holding.
• The company name is required: a bare ticker like AAPL is ambiguous on Google News and is rejected (free).
• Up to 50 companies per run; can be combined with normal queries.
• News headlines, sources and links only. No stock prices, no market data, no investment advice.

Output

One dataset row per new article: query, title, source, domain, url, canonicalUrl, snippet, publishedAt (UTC, when an exact time is given), publishedText (e.g. "2 hours ago"), imageUrl, rank, isTopStory, firstSeenAt, monitorId.

The run OUTPUT record lists every query with its status: ok, baseline, failed (not charged) or skipped.

Pricing

Event	Price	When
query-checked	$0.004	per query answered (also when nothing new was found)
new-article	$0.002	per article row returned
actor-start	$0.005	once per run, only if at least one query was answered
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	Apify's standard per-run start event

Example: 10 queries in one daily run with ~3 new articles each ≈ $3.15/month. Invalid input, failed or timed-out queries, baseline articles and test mode are free.

Limits

• Runs typically take 1–2 minutes (results come from a standard data queue).

• Results are Google News search results for your query, location and language, not every article published.

• Metadata only: no article text, no paywall or login access.

• Free Apify plan: up to 5 queries per run and a daily limit.

FAQ

Why did my first run return no articles? The first run of a Monitor ID records a baseline (free articles, query charged). Turn on Return current articles on the first run (firstRunEmitsAll) to get them, or use oneOff mode. Will I get duplicates? The same story at a different URL is matched by normalised link and by title on the same site. Running the same Monitor ID twice at the same time can still produce duplicates. Does it return full article text? No. It returns metadata only (title, source, time, link, snippet when available). Can I monitor several clients? Yes. Use a different monitorId per client or schedule.

Integrations

• Apify API and SDKs: call it from Python, JavaScript or any HTTP client and read results from the run's dataset.
• Schedules and webhooks: run it on a schedule in Apify and trigger your own endpoint when a run finishes.
• Make, Zapier, n8n: use Apify's own integrations for these tools to start runs and pass dataset rows on.
• AI agents (MCP): agents can call it through the Apify MCP server.

Data source & terms

News results and metadata are sourced from Google News via the DataForSEO API. The service is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Data is provided for monitoring and analytics of the topics the customer selects, and may not be used to create a service that competes with general search engines. The service is not offered to customers in Russia, Belarus, Syria, North Korea, or occupied Crimea.

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See every SteadyScrape (steady-scrape) Actor on our Apify profile.