10 Best Google Alerts Alternatives in 2026 (Free and Paid)

Google Alerts is the default tool for tracking keywords on the web. It’s free, takes 30 seconds to set up, and delivers results by email. For years, that was good enough.

It isn’t anymore. A Contify study of Fortune 1000 companies found that only about 10% of Google Alerts results were actually relevant to the business. Worse, roughly 40% of important news was never detected at all. In a head-to-head comparison, Mention caught 3.7x more results tracking the same keywords. Google Alerts also covers zero social media, hasn’t received a meaningful update in years, and delivers everything through email or RSS with no Slack, Discord, or webhook option.

If you’ve been relying on Google Alerts and wondering why you keep missing things, here are ten alternatives worth considering.

Quick Comparison

Free Alternatives

1. Talkwalker Alerts

Talkwalker Alerts (now part of Hootsuite) is the closest direct replacement. Type in a keyword, choose how often you want alerts, and get email notifications when it appears on news sites, blogs, forums, or Twitter. Setup takes about 30 seconds, just like Google Alerts.

It supports Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for precise queries, which Google Alerts also offers. The main upgrade: Talkwalker pulls from a broader set of sources and includes Twitter coverage, something Google Alerts completely lacks.

Limitations: Still email-based by default (though it now supports RSS and Slack). Social media coverage is limited to Twitter. No AI filtering. For anything beyond basic keyword matching, you’ll need a paid tool.

Best for: Anyone who wants a direct, free swap for Google Alerts with slightly better coverage.

2. F5Bot

F5Bot does one thing well: it monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters for your keywords, then emails you within minutes. This is a blind spot for both Google Alerts and most social listening tools.

The free tier gives you 200 keywords with a limit of 50 alerts per day per keyword. Paid plans ($14.17/mo for Power, $58.33/mo for Ultra) add Slack/Discord webhooks, RSS feeds, and AI-powered semantic matching.

Limitations: Only three platforms. Popular keywords that trigger more than 50 mentions per day get automatically disabled on the free plan. No web or news coverage.

Best for: Developers and indie makers who want to know when their product, brand, or topic comes up on Reddit or HN. Pairs well with another tool for broader web coverage.

Social Listening Tools

If your goal is brand monitoring across social media and the web, these tools cover what Google Alerts never attempted.

3. Alertmouse

Alertmouse is the newest tool on this list, launched in late 2025 by Rand Fishkin (the founder of Moz and SparkToro), Adam Doppelt, and Nathan Kriege. It was built specifically as a better Google Alerts: same simplicity, broader coverage, and smarter filtering.

It monitors social media, news articles, blogs, and other online sources. You get exact phrase matching with keyword inclusion/exclusion, site blocking to filter noise, and a mentions graph showing activity over time. Notifications come as daily or weekly email digests. Over 1,000 people signed up in the first few hours after launch.

Pricing: Free (1 alert) → Basic $10/mo (5 alerts, 3 users, unlimited mentions) → Pro and Enterprise custom.

Limitations: Still new, so the feature set is evolving. Email-only notifications (no Slack/Discord webhooks yet). Limited public reviews since it’s less than 6 months old.

Best for: People who want exactly what Google Alerts should be: simple keyword monitoring across social and web, with better filtering, at $10/mo. The closest thing to a direct upgrade.

4. Awario

Awario crawls Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, news sites, blogs, forums, and web pages for your keywords. It offers Boolean search, sentiment analysis, and real-time email alerts. Among social listening tools, it has the most accessible pricing.

Pricing: Starter $49/mo ($29 annual), Pro $149/mo ($89 annual), Enterprise $399/mo ($249 annual).

Limitations: No LinkedIn or TikTok monitoring. Users on G2 report occasional accuracy issues with irrelevant results. No refund policy for unused months. The learning curve can be steep.

Best for: Small marketing teams that need social + web monitoring without enterprise pricing.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is built for PR and marketing teams who need serious brand monitoring. It tracks mentions across news, blogs, forums, review sites, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more. The AI features include sentiment analysis, influencer scoring, and automated PDF reports.

Pricing: Individual $79/mo, Team $99/mo, Pro $149/mo, Enterprise from $199/mo.

Limitations: At $79/mo minimum, it’s a significant jump from free Google Alerts. Facebook monitoring is limited due to API restrictions. Users on G2 mention spam results and occasional irrelevant mentions getting through the filters.

Best for: Marketing teams and agencies that need comprehensive brand monitoring with reporting. Overkill for personal use.

RSS + AI Approach

A fundamentally different way to solve the problem: instead of monitoring keywords across the entire web, you subscribe to specific sources and use AI to filter what matters.

6. Feedly

Feedly is the most popular RSS reader with over 14 million registered users. Its AI assistant "Leo" can prioritize, summarize, and deduplicate articles based on your interests. If your goal is staying on top of industry news from trusted sources, Feedly with Leo is powerful.

The catch: Leo requires Pro+ ($8.93/mo annual billing, $15.99/mo monthly). The free and $6.99/mo Pro plans have zero AI features. And if you want Slack or Teams integration, that’s Enterprise only, estimated at $1,600+/month.

Limitations: Feedly is a reading app. You open it to consume content. It won’t proactively push notifications to Slack, Discord, or Telegram without enterprise pricing or third-party tools like Zapier (with their own costs). No Discord or Telegram support at all.

Best for: People who enjoy browsing an RSS reader and want AI to help sort the noise. Not ideal if you want alerts pushed to your existing tools.

7. SignalHub

SignalHub takes the opposite approach from Feedly. Instead of being a reading app, it’s a monitoring and push tool. You add RSS feeds and websites, write an AI filter in plain language ("only show me Series A funding announcements in AI startups"), and matching content gets pushed to Slack, Discord, Telegram, Email, Microsoft Teams, or any of 10+ notification channels.

The free plan includes 1 tracker with 5 sources and access to all notification channels. That alone covers more delivery options than most tools on this list offer at any price. You can also follow Community Trackers that other users have already configured.

What sets it apart: Every plan, including Free, gets AI filtering and 10+ notification channels. Feedly locks Slack behind enterprise pricing. Yutori is email-only unless you pay $100/mo for webhooks. F5Bot limits free users to email. SignalHub makes push notifications the default, not a premium add-on.

Limitations: You need to know which sources to monitor (no automatic web-wide keyword crawling like Google Alerts). It doesn’t cover social media directly, though many social accounts have RSS feeds. Not a reading app.

Best for: Anyone who wants to monitor specific sources with AI filtering and get results pushed to the tools they already use, without paying enterprise prices.

Page Change Detection

Google Alerts monitors the web for new content matching keywords. These tools monitor specific pages for any changes. Different problem, but often what people actually need.

8. Visualping

Visualping is the market leader in page change detection, used by over 2 million people. It takes screenshots of web pages on a schedule and notifies you when something changes. The AI feature "Ping AI" can summarize changes in plain language.

Pricing: Free (5 pages) → $10/mo → $100/mo → $250/mo, plus extra costs for workspaces and support.

Limitations: False positives are the most common complaint on G2. Pricing adds up quickly beyond the free tier. Not designed for tracking topics or news across sources.

Best for: Monitoring specific URLs like competitor pricing pages, job boards, or regulatory filings.

9. changedetection.io

changedetection.io is the open-source alternative with over 30,000 GitHub stars. Self-host it via Docker for free, or use managed hosting at $8.99/mo for up to 5,000 URLs. It supports CSS/XPath selectors and 85+ notification channels through Apprise.

Limitations: JavaScript-heavy pages need extra setup. Documentation can be hard to follow. No AI features.

Best for: Technical users who want self-hosted page monitoring with full control.

AI-Powered Monitoring

10. Yutori Scouts

Yutori Scouts takes a radically different approach. Instead of monitoring specific sources, it runs Google searches on a schedule using AI agents (~1 million tokens per run) to find, read, and summarize relevant results. Founded by ex-Meta AI researchers (Llama 3 team) with $15M in backing from Jeff Dean and Fei-Fei Li.

Pricing: Free (1 Scout, daily) → $15/mo (10 Scouts, hourly) → $100/mo (webhook access).

Limitations: The team acknowledges a ~10% error rate. Email-only notifications unless you pay $100/mo for webhooks. No Slack, Discord, or Telegram. No RSS support. You can’t specify which sites to watch.

Best for: People who want zero-config topic monitoring and don’t mind occasional inaccuracies. Think of it as a smarter, more expensive Google Alerts.

How to Pick the Right Alternative

The Bottom Line

Google Alerts still works for basic, zero-cost keyword monitoring. If you check it knowing it will miss things, it’s fine as a supplement.

But if you’ve been relying on it as your primary monitoring tool, you’re almost certainly missing important content. The alternatives range from free (Talkwalker Alerts, F5Bot) to enterprise-grade (Brand24, Mention). The right choice depends on what you’re actually trying to monitor and where you want the results delivered.

For most individual users and small teams, the sweet spot is combining a couple of tools. Something like Talkwalker Alerts for free web coverage, F5Bot for Reddit/HN, and SignalHub for AI-filtered monitoring of specific sources pushed to Slack or Discord. That combination costs little to nothing and covers far more ground than Google Alerts alone.