A Google Alerts alternative for teams: from keyword emails to a written briefing

Google Alerts is free, takes a minute to set up, and does one thing: it emails you links to pages that match a keyword. For keeping an eye on your own name, that is enough. Teams usually outgrow it for three reasons.

Where keyword alerts fall short

• A keyword is not a subject. "Telecom regulation" as a phrase misses the story that never uses those two words, and catches the ones that only mention them in passing.
• Links are not reading. An alert tells you a page exists. Someone still has to open it and decide whether it matters.
• It is one inbox. Alerts go to whoever set them up. Sharing them means forwarding emails.

What to look for in an alternative

The alternatives fall into a few groups, and they are built for different jobs.

• Brand and social listening tools track mentions of a name across social media and the press, with sentiment and volume charts. They suit marketing and PR teams.
• Page change monitors tell you when a specific web page changes. They suit compliance teams watching a known list of pages.
• Monitoring APIs deliver structured results to developers building their own pipeline.
• Written briefings search by subject, read the results and write up the few that matter. They suit a team that wants to be told what happened.

If you were using Google Alerts to stay informed about a subject, as opposed to counting mentions, the last group is the one to look at.

How Relay does it

Relay belongs to that last group. You describe the subject in a few sentences, including what counts as news and what to leave out. An agent searches on that description, reads what it finds, and writes a briefing: a headline, what happened, why it matters, and the sources. An earlier article explains the steps.

For a team, three things matter more than the search itself.

• A desk. Agents live on a desk that your colleagues join, so everyone reads the same briefings in one feed.
• Delivery where the team already is. A briefing can arrive by email, in a Slack channel or in a Telegram group.
• Words you never want missed. Next to the description you can list exact terms. A story that names one reaches you by rule, which is the part of keyword alerts worth keeping.

Moving over

You do not need to switch everything at once. Take the two or three alerts that produce the most noise, write one description that covers what you wanted from them, and run both for a fortnight. The guide shows the setup step by step.