Google Alerts

Everybody evaluating a listening tool has already wondered whether Google Alerts would do, so here is the straight answer. Alerts emails you, or feeds you by RSS, when your keywords appear in content Google has indexed — news, blogs and the wider web. You pick the frequency, sources, language and region. It costs nothing and always has. If all you need is to know when your organisation is named in a news story, it is sufficient, and paying for anything in this catalogue would be overspending. Now the limits, because they are the reason paid tools exist. There is no social coverage worth the name — Reddit, X, TikTok, LinkedIn and forums are effectively invisible. There is no sentiment, no share of voice, no competitor benchmarking and no dashboard. There is no history: alerts begin the day you create them, so you cannot ask what happened last quarter. Syndicated wire copy arrives over and over with no deduplication. There is no API, no team workflow and no way to assign anything to anyone. And coverage is inconsistent by reputation, with no SLA, because this is a free consumer feature rather than a product anyone supports. Start here. Move on when one of those limits actually bites.