Google Alerts is fine until you need several countries, exact control over the query, or the results as data. Google News search is much better for this, because it accepts the usual operators. Here's how I turn it into a daily brand and competitor monitor that outputs a clean table.

Write the query like a search pro

Google News search understands:

  • "exact phrase" for your brand name
  • OR to cover spellings or products
  • -word to drop noise
  • site:example.com to watch one publisher

So "Fjord Labs" OR fjordlabs -job catches the brand and skips job ads.

The code

I use a hosted Actor I maintain on Apify (Google News Scraper). With the Python client (pip install apify-client pandas):

from apify_client import ApifyClient import pandas as pd client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>") run = client.actor("fjordlabs/google-news").call(run_input={ "queries": ['"heat pump" subsidy', '"Tesla" -stock'], "editions": ["US:en", "GB:en", "DE:de", "DK:da"], "timeRange": "past_day", "maxArticlesPerFeed": 50, "deduplicate": True, }) df = pd.DataFrame(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()) print(df[["edition", "query", "publisher", "publishedAt", "title"]].head(20))

Each row has the headline, publisher, publish time, the article URL and related headlines Google groups with it:

{"title": "Heat pump sales surge as subsidies expand", "publisher": "Example Times", "publishedAt": "2026-10-16T17:30:00+00:00", "edition": "US:en", "query": "\"heat pump\" subsidy"}

Who covers you most? 

print(df.groupby(["edition", "publisher"]).size().sort_values(ascending=False).head(10))

That one line is a decent "share of voice" report when you run it for yourself and two competitors.

Make it a monitor

Schedule it daily with timeRange: "past_day" and add Apify's Slack, email or webhook integration. Articles cost $0.0015 each, and deduplicate removes the same story syndicated across editions, so you don't pay for it twice. You can also use topics (Business, Technology...) or top stories instead of a search.

Disclosure: I built and maintain the scraper. Questions and feature requests welcome in the comments. Links to Apify include my referral code.