Since its launch way back in 2003, Google Alerts has been a favorite free tool of PR and marketing professionals for tracking mentions across websites, news sites, and blogs.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
However, the tool is not without its limitations – not least of which is its inability to monitor mentions across social media sites.
Consider this: As of January 2024, 62.3 percent of the world’s population – that is, a whopping 5.04 billion people – use social media. That translates to a massive gap in web monitoring for Google Alerts users, leading to the need for better options.
Here we’ll look at seven top Google Alerts alternatives for PR pros. Most of these tools pack additional features as well, making it easy to measure and get insights about your brand’s reach, impressions, share of voice, audience sentiment, and more.
What is Google Alerts?
Google Alerts is Google’s free tool for monitoring specific keywords on news sites, webpages, videos, books, blogs, and discussion forums – basically, anywhere that your keyword shows up in Google’s index, except for social media posts.
For instance, you might create a Google Alert for your brand name, team members’ names, competitors, or industry keywords and events. Google will then send you email notifications whenever it finds your keyword mentioned online.
Google Alerts pros
For PR and marketing professionals, an online media monitoring tool like Google Alerts can help with the following activities:
- Brand monitoring and reputation management. Track the conversations that are happening around your brand, identify potential PR crises, and quickly respond to any negative mentions.
- Customer support. Respond promptly to customer questions and problems, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
- Market research. Discover new opportunities and product ideas, track competitors, and stay informed about industry news and trends.
- Reporting. Get insights about your digital PR activities, helping you understand where you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
- Content marketing and SEO. Get ideas for social media and blog content or discover link-building opportunities by following up on unlinked media mentions.
- Influencer marketing: Identify top influencers, brand advocates, and journalists in your niche.
Google Alerts cons
Google Alerts is popular because it’s free and easy to set up. But there are a few problems with this “free” tool that can add up to an opportunity cost. Namely:
- It’s missing features that are necessary for an informed digital PR strategy – for instance, advanced filters, real-time mobile alerts, sentiment analysis, campaign performance tracking, competitor benchmarking, data analysis and reporting, and smart insights.
- I’ll say it again: Google Alerts doesn’t track social mentions!
- Some users have reported issues with the tool not discovering all their important web mentions, which I’ll touch on next.
Does Google Alerts still work in 2024?
Yes – well, sort of.
Google hasn’t discontinued their free web monitoring tool. However, they don’t seem to be maintaining it, either. Many users have reported that their Google Alerts are a bit hit-or-miss, with a lot of important mentions going unnoticed by the tool. I have experienced this issue myself.
Plus, I’m no longer getting their email notifications for whatever reason, so I have to view my mentions directly in the tool – which of course defeats the whole purpose of a Google Alert.
Google itself has acknowledged issues with its tool as far back as 2013, leading many marketers to look for alternatives.
What are the best Google Alerts alternatives?
Here are our picks for the best alternatives to Google Alerts for marketing and PR pros.
1. Determ
Determ is a complete media monitoring and social listening solution for marketing and PR pros. It monitors over 100 million online sources – websites, news sites, blogs, forums, and comments. Plus, it works with all the major social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit.
In fact, if a source you want to track isn’t yet in Determ’s extensive database, you can request the team to add it at no extra cost. You can also monitor mentions in any language and location.
Depending on your preference, Determ can notify you in real time whenever someone mentions you online, or just when you’re trending. You can receive your alert notifications via email, Slack, or the mobile app. Some other incrediblty valuable features by Determ include extensive sentiment analysis which can be incredibly benefitial when analyzing the mentions collected.
Determ helps you get more out of your marketing efforts by tracking your online coverage and brand sentiment at the campaign level. With its precise filtering and tagging options, AI-powered insights, and rich data visualizations, the platform is a feature-rich and smarter alternative to Google Alerts.
One of the biggest benefits its’ users love is the AI Asisstant Synthia. Here’s what Jovanna Madera, Digital Media Analyst at Ministry of Finance (Dominican Republic) says:
“We love Synthia, it’s very practical. We especially appreciate that the AI can analyze unique topics, provide highly resourceful recommendations, and assign an accurate tone of voice to each news summary.”
Determ’s users highlight the platform’s user friendliness and prompt customer support as some of the top reasons they prefer it to comparable tools.
Pricing
Available on request.
2. Talkwalker Alerts
Talkwalker Alerts is a free Google Alerts alternative created by the team at Talkwalker, an online media monitoring service. Like Google Alerts, the tool monitors mentions of your brand across the web, including news sites, webpages, blogs, and forums. Plus, it also picks up Twitter (X) mentions.
You can choose to have all of your mentions emailed to you, or just the ones that TalkWalker deems important – for instance, tweets with the most engagement. You can also filter your results by source, such as blog results only, and customize your searches using brackets and Boolean operators (i.e., AND, AND NOT, and OR).
Unlike Google Alerts, you don’t need a Google account to use TalkWalker Alerts – it works with any email address.
Setup is fast and easy, and TalkWalker lets you choose how often you want to see your alerts. If you choose “As It Happens,” you’ll get them in near real time.
Pricing
Talkwalker Alerts is a free tool. If you need advanced social listening and media monitoring capabilities, you’ll need to upgrade to one of Talkwalker’s paid plans.
3. Mention
Mention is a well-known contender in the brand monitoring and social listening space. They launched as a better Google Alerts alternative in 2012, around the same time when people were starting to report issues with Google’s own monitoring tool.
That said, Mention has a suite of features that Google Alerts doesn’t, including the ability to analyze sentiment around your brand, compare your share of voice to your competitors’, identify top social media influencers, and see how your mentions have grown or changed over time.
You can use Mention to monitor news sites, blogs, comments, and user reviews. The tool also works with top social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Mention can also create, schedule, and publish social media posts.
Pricing
Pricing plans (billed monthly) are as follows:
- Solo: $49
- Pro: $99
- ProPlus: $179
4. Awario
Awario is a smaller company in the brand monitoring space. Their social listening tool was developed in 2015 by the same company behind the popular digital marketing software SEO PowerSuite. Awario brings its technical SEO expertise to the forefront, crawling over 13 billion webpages per day in addition to their partnerships with third-party data providers.
Awario tracks mentions across news sites, blogs, forums, and review sites, plus social media and video sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and Vimeo. Their tool is used by small local businesses, startups, and international brands.
Like Google Alerts, Awario sends you alert notifications via email. You can also view and reply to your mentions in real time using the mentions feed, making Awario a great choice for customer service and social selling.
Awario’s sentiment analysis feature helps you avert PR and social media crises by spotting (and responding to) sudden spikes in negative mentions. Using Awario’s analytics, you can understand more about the people who are talking about your brand, including their age, gender, language, and location.
Other features include advanced filters and Awario Leads, a tool for discovering prospective customers.
Pricing
Pricing plans (billed monthly) include:
- Starter: CAD 67
- Pro: CAD 202
- Enterprise: CAD 509
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a popular social media management tool for SMBs, agencies, and enterprises. With its social listening features, it also doubles as an alternative to Google Alerts. Its AI-powered platform provides smart insights, equipping your brand to over deliver and get one up on the competition.
With social listening templates for goals like competitor and campaign analysis, event monitoring, brand health, and industry insights, you can easily start tracking the conversations you need – no Boolean knowledge necessary.
Advanced filtering capabilities let you cut through the noise of irrelevant mentions and get to the data that matters most.
Sprout Social works with all the top social platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Pricing
Sprout Social is primarily a social media publishing and customer experience solution. Therefore, its complete set of social listening and influencer marketing features are currently only available as an add-on to its standard pricing plans.
Monthly pricing is as follows:
- Standard: $249 per month
- Professional: $399 per month
- Advanced: $499 per month
6. Brand24
Brand24 is an AI-powered social media monitoring tool with affordable pricing tiers for individuals and businesses. It lets you monitor everything from websites and social media to forums, podcasts, reviews, and more – all in real time.
You can get your brand mentions sent to you in a variety of ways, including email and Slack notifications, daily and weekly reports, and smartphone push notifications. You can also view your mentions as a word cloud to better understand the context around them.
Brand24 can also help you track the reach of your marketing campaigns, benchmark against your competitors, and automate reporting with your team. You’ll get automated insights about what your customers like or dislike about your products or services. Advanced sentiment analysis lets you segment your online mentions based on whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.
Pricing
Pricing plans (billed monthly) are as follows:
- Individual: $99
- Team: $179
- Pro: $249
- Enterprise: $499
7. Meltwater
Meltwater is a suite of media monitoring and social listening tools for enterprises. It tracks real-time brand mentions everywhere – across websites, social media, podcasts, print, and broadcast. Besides customizable media alerts, it also offers social media management, media relations, and influencer marketing capabilities.
Meltwater’s advanced social listening analytics help you understand your customers, react quickly to social media crises, and collaborate effectively between your PR and customer experience teams.
The platform gives you a 15-month rolling picture of your historical data, making it possible to identify trends and run year-on-year comparisons.
Meltwater is designed for large organizations that need a comprehensive toolset for media, social, and consumer intelligence, so it’s pricier than most of the other options on this list.
Pricing
Available on request.
Closing thoughts
While Google Alerts certainly has its uses, the tool’s irregular performance in recent years – plus the absence of important features like social media tracking and advanced analytics – has prompted many marketers to look elsewhere for their media monitoring needs.
The tools discussed here offer robust alternatives to Google Alerts for marketers, media professionals, and anyone else who wants to get ahead in the competitive world of digital PR.
Author bio: Chloe Brittain is a freelance writer and the founder of Monday Roadmap, a blog for content creators navigating the new landscape of GenAI tools.
