Brand news monitoring in your own tools: only new articles, as JSON, on your schedule
You want to know when a brand, a competitor or a topic appears in the news, and you want it in a script, a spreadsheet, Slack, n8n or an AI agent rather than in an inbox. Here is what an e-mail alert gives you, and what PlainRows offers.
What Google Alerts does
From Google's help page Create an alert on 2026-10-08:
- You create each alert by hand on the Google Alerts page, signed in to a Google account.
- "You'll get emails whenever we find matching search results"; options are how often, the types of sites, language, region and how many results.
- The page describes no API: there is no documented way to create alerts or read their results from code.
What PlainRows offers
The Google News Scraper API with Only new articles turned on: schedule it hourly or daily, and each run returns only the Google News articles it has never delivered to you (title, URL, publisher, snippet, publication time, position), as JSON, CSV or Excel, or straight into n8n, Make, Zapier, Slack or Google Sheets. The memory of delivered articles stays in your own Apify account.
| Data | Tool | Price (Starter plan) |
|---|---|---|
| New Google News articles for up to 1,000 searches per run (brand names, "exact phrases", -excluded words), in 20 countries and their languages. | Google News Scraper API | $0.0016 per new article; runs with nothing new cost nothing |
Example: watching 10 brand names, with about 5 new articles each per day, is about 1,500 articles a month, about $2.40. The tool runs on Apify: the free plan is enough to test it, the Starter plan ($19 per month with $19 of usage included, apify.com/pricing) removes the free-plan limits.
Ready-made workflow: new Google News articles about your brand to Slack (n8n).
When an e-mail alert is the better choice
- You follow a handful of topics and an e-mail is all you need: Google Alerts is free.
- You also want blogs, forums and other web pages: Google Alerts covers more than news; this tool reads Google News only.
Competitor facts checked on 2026-10-08 from the linked pages; prices change, check them before you decide.