How to set up Google Alerts for competitors (and what it will never catch)
Set alerts for the company name, the founders' names, and the brand plus the word alternative. Then understand its blind spot: Alerts watches for articles, not for pages.
Google Alerts is free, takes two minutes, and everyone recommends it as the starting point for competitor monitoring.
It is worth setting up. It is also the weakest tool in your kit, and understanding exactly why will save you from a false sense of coverage.
The setup, quickly
Go to Google Alerts. Create these.
The company name in quotes. Exact match, or you will drown in unrelated results if their name is a common word.
Each founder's name. Founders talk. They go on podcasts, they post, they get quoted, and they say things in public that the company would never put in a press release.
The brand name plus the word alternative. This is the best one on the list. Anyone writing or searching for a competitor alternative is a person actively trying to leave them, and that is a signal with a wallet attached.
Set each to deliver as it happens, or once a day if you are the kind of person who will otherwise turn them off in irritation.
That is the whole setup. It genuinely takes two minutes.
Now the part nobody tells you
Google Alerts watches for new content to be published on the web. It looks for articles.
It does not watch a page.
Read that again, because it is the entire limitation. If a competitor changes their pricing page on a Tuesday afternoon, quietly, with no announcement, then there is no article. There will never be an article. No journalist writes about a SaaS company changing a number on a page.
Google Alerts will show you nothing, because there is nothing to show. And you will feel covered, because you set up alerts, and the alerts are working perfectly. They are just working on the wrong problem.
The most expensive competitor moves are the silent ones. Alerts is structurally blind to every one of them.
What it is actually good for
Used for what it is, it earns its two minutes.
It catches funding announcements, press coverage, podcast appearances, acquisition news, and the occasional blog post that reveals more than intended. That is a real layer. It is the layer of things loud enough that someone wrote about them.
Just be clear with yourself about what it does not cover. Silent pricing changes, quiet feature launches, new job posts, changed ad copy, none of that produces an article, and none of it will ever reach your inbox this way.
Set up the alerts. Then go solve the page-change problem separately, because that is where the moves that cost you money actually live.