Brand & News Mention Monitor: Google Alerts as an API

Google Alerts, except it outputs structured data you can actually use. Give it a brand name or a few keywords and it returns every recent mention across Google News, GDELT's global news index and Hacker News as clean JSON rows, deduplicated and dated. Turn on monitor mode and it remembers what it already reported, so a daily schedule only pushes new mentions and can post them straight to a Slack channel. Brand24 and Mention start at $199 to $599 a month for this. Here you pay $0.008 per mention actually found, nothing when there is nothing to report.

Built for PR and comms teams, founders tracking their own startup, and anyone doing competitive intel on a shoestring budget.

Coverage, stated honestly

This actor covers news and Hacker News, not social media. There is no Instagram, TikTok or X (Twitter) mention feed here, and there won't be: Reddit is deliberately left out too, since scraping it is under active litigation as of 2026. If a brand's mentions live mostly in social chatter, this is not the tool. If they live in press, blogs, trade publications and developer discussion, which is where most B2B and tech brand mentions actually surface, this covers it well and does it for a fraction of the SaaS price.

What you get

Each mention is one flat record:

Field	What it is
source	google_news, gdelt or hacker_news
url	Link to the article or story
title	Headline or story title
snippet	Short excerpt when the source provides one, else null
publishedAt	ISO date the article/story went up
domain	Publisher domain
language	Article language
matchedKeyword	Which of your keywords/competitors matched
isCompetitor	true if matched against a competitors term rather than a keywords term
points	Hacker News points, null for other sources
isNew	true when in monitor mode this mention wasn't reported in a previous run
retrievedAt	When this actor fetched it

Quick start

{
    "keywords": ["Apify"],
    "language": "en",
    "country": "US",
    "maxAgeDays": 7
}

Watch your own brand plus a couple of rivals, and only alert when there's something new:

{
    "keywords": ["Acme Robotics"],
    "competitors": ["Rival Corp", "OtherCo"],
    "language": "en",
    "country": "US",
    "maxAgeDays": 3,
    "monitorMode": true,
    "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX/YYY/ZZZ"
}

Schedule that one daily in the Apify Console (Tasks -> Schedules) and each run posts a Slack digest of only the mentions that showed up since the last run.

Inputs worth knowing about

• keywords: brands or terms to watch. Required, at least one.
• competitors: same search, tagged isCompetitor: true on output so you can filter your own coverage from theirs.
• language / country: drive the Google News edition searched.
• useGoogleNews, useGdelt, useHackerNews: turn any source off if you don't need it.
• maxAgeDays: drop anything older than this (also sets how far back GDELT looks).
• strictMatch: require the keyword as a whole word or phrase in the title. Turn this on for short or ambiguous names, a brand called Mistral otherwise picks up every story about the Mediterranean wind, and Orange picks up fruit.
• maxResults: hard cap on mentions per run.
• monitorMode + webhookUrl: remembers previous runs and reports (and charges for) only new mentions, with an optional Slack/webhook digest.

Why not just Google Alerts

Google Alerts emails you headlines with no structure, no dedup, no competitor tagging, no webhook, and no way to pull the data into a spreadsheet, a CRM or an AI agent. This actor gives you the same coverage as a paid brand-monitoring tool as a clean dataset (JSON, CSV, Excel, or via the API), with GDELT and Hacker News added on top (global newswire and tech-community coverage Google Alerts doesn't index), and MCP support for AI agents.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription:

Event	Price	When
Mention found	$0.008	Per unique mention pushed to the dataset (in monitor mode: new mentions only)
Digest sent	$0.03	Only when monitor mode actually posts a webhook/Slack digest

The dedup is where the money is. Say a daily sweep finds 40 mentions of your brand on day one, then about 5 genuinely new ones a day: you pay for 40 once, then 5 a day (about $2.40 in the first month). A plain per-result news scraper re-charges you the same 40 articles on every scheduled run, so a cheaper unit price ends up costing more by week two.

Platform usage is included in the per-mention price, so there is no subscription, no minimum and no usage line on your bill. No proxy setup is needed; if Google News ever blocks a request, the actor retries through Apify's datacenter proxy on its own.

FAQ

How do I get a Slack alert when my company is in the news? Set monitorMode: true, paste a Slack incoming-webhook URL into webhookUrl, and schedule the actor to run daily (or hourly) as an Apify Task. The first run reports everything found; every run after that reports, and charges for, only what's new.

Is there a free brand monitoring option here? Runs cost nothing beyond the mentions actually delivered (misses are free), and Apify's free tier covers a small daily schedule outright. There's no seat price like Brand24 or Mention charge.

Does this cover Twitter/X, Instagram or TikTok? No, on purpose. This actor covers news and developer/tech community discussion (Hacker News). Reddit is left out too, deliberately, for legal reasons. If social coverage is the priority, this isn't the right tool.

How far back does it look? maxAgeDays controls it, up to 90 days. GDELT and Hacker News both search their own recent windows; anything older than maxAgeDays is filtered out regardless of source.

What counts as a match? By default, a loose case-insensitive match against the article or story title. Turn on strictMatch for whole-word/phrase matching if your brand name is a common word.

Where does the data come from? Google News' public RSS search, the GDELT Project's public news index, and the Hacker News (Algolia) search API. All three are public indexes; results are headlines and links, not the full article text, so you always click through to read and act on the source.

Is it reliable? Google News RSS is read directly (it's a tiny XML feed); if it ever gets blocked, the actor retries through a proxy on its own. GDELT hard rate-limits itself, so it's treated as a secondary source and a rate-limited query is simply skipped for that run rather than failing the whole thing.

Can I use it with AI agents? Yes, via REST API and MCP.

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Something missing?

If you need an extra field, another source, or a different output, open an issue on this Actor and describe it. I read every request and small additions usually ship within days. More monitors and data Actors are on my profile.

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