Google Alerts is broken for agencies. Here's what we built instead.

If you run a boutique agency, you already have a competitor-monitoring stack. It's called "a folder of Google Alerts, three RSS feeds, a saved Twitter search, and the vague anxiety that you missed something."

That stack worked in 2015. It doesn't work now, and the reasons are specific.

What actually broke

1. Google Alerts stopped catching things. It was never comprehensive, but the gap widened. It misses paywalled trade press, most Substacks, changelog and pricing pages, LinkedIn posts, and a lot of news that only shows up in Google News proper. For a whole category of "our competitor quietly changed their pricing page," Alerts is blind — there's no article to index.

2. The signal-to-noise ratio collapsed. Point an alert at a competitor with a common name and you get press-release reprints, job-board scrapes, listicles ("Top 10 alternatives to..."), and the same story rewritten by eight outlets. You're not monitoring a competitor, you're doing unpaid content moderation.

3. There's no "so what." An alert tells you a thing happened. It doesn't tell you it's the third price rise in your category this quarter, or that it changes what you should say in next week's client renewal call. The interpretation — the part that's actually worth money — is still 100% manual.

4. It doesn't fit how an agency works. You're not tracking one company. You're tracking 4 clients' competitive sets, plus your own tool landscape, plus 2 regulatory topics — 30 to 60 moving things. Google Alerts gives you 30 to 60 separate inboxes-within-an-inbox and zero grouping.

The tools that "solve" this cost more than your rent

Crayon, Klue, Kompyte — real competitive-intelligence platforms, genuinely good, built for a 12-person product-marketing team at a company doing $50M. Quote-on-request pricing that starts in the four-figures-per-month range. Onboarding calls. A "success manager."

A three-person agency doesn't need a battle-card platform with a Salesforce integration. It needs to not get blindsided. Between "free tool that doesn't work" and "enterprise contract you can't justify," there is currently nothing built for small teams. That's the gap.

What we're building

We got tired of duct-taping Zapier flows together to keep up with a handful of competitors, so we're building the thing we wanted:

• You define sources in plain terms — RSS feeds, Google News queries, specific URLs we watch for content changes, subreddits. 15 to 40 per project.
• You say what matters in plain English — "pricing changes, new features, funding, key hires at [these competitors]; anything about AI Overviews." That sentence drives the filter. No boolean query builder.
• You get one briefing — daily or weekly, by email. Grouped by theme, deduplicated across sources, each item with a two-line TL;DR and a "why this matters to you" written against your stated interests.
• Plus instant alerts — a separate email the moment something hits your criteria hard. A competitor drops their price, you know within the hour, not next Monday.

It's not magic. Under the hood it's decent source coverage, aggressive deduplication, and an LLM doing the summarize-and-contextualize pass that you're currently doing by hand on your second coffee.

What a real briefing looks like

This is a genuine briefing generated for a stand-in agency — "Northwind Digital," a boutique SEO/content shop that resells Semrush and Ahrefs seats to B2B SaaS clients. The agency is fictional. Every news item and number below is real and linked, covering the week of Aug 25 – Sep 1, 2026.

Weekly briefing · Northwind Digital · Sep 1, 2026 7 relevant signals · 2 instant alerts sent earlier · 14 duplicates merged · 9 items filtered as noise

Pricing & packaging

Semrush kills its free tier, raising entry pricing to 139.95/moafterAdobe′s 1.9B acquisition closed. Why it matters: you resell Semrush to 6 clients — the free tier was your "try before you buy" onboarding step, and you'll have to explain the price hike at renewal.

Ahrefs follows with a price rise — Lite plan now $129/mo. Why it matters: both core tools got more expensive in the same quarter. Time to negotiate a bundled client rate.

Clay retired its small plans — entry is now 185/mo(was 49). Why it matters: your lead-research stack just got ~4x pricier. Apollo's new AI assistant (below) is a cheaper swap worth testing.

Product & AI features

HubSpot moved Breeze AI agents to outcome-based pricing — $0.50 per resolved conversation, $1 per qualified lead, instead of a flat monthly fee. Why it matters: lower risk for your HubSpot clients to trial the agents — a clean upsell for your retainer.

Market: the AI-search shift

AI Overviews cut informational traffic 20–40%, but AI-search visitors convert far better (internal reports range from 4x to 20x+). Competitors SEOPACK and MarketJoy launched GEO/AEO packages this week. Why it matters: this is your Q4 client story. Reframe reporting around AI-search visibility and conversion before competitors own the pitch.

Cloudflare changes default AI-crawler settings on Sep 15. Why it matters: affects every client site behind Cloudflare — a 20-minute audit this week avoids surprises.

That's the whole thing. Two minutes to read, and every line is either actionable or explicitly marked as "we looked, it's noise."

Where this is right now

Pre-launch. The pipeline works — the briefing above came out of it — but we're validating demand before we build the full self-serve product. If the "one briefing, not 200 alerts" pitch is something you'd actually pay $19–39/month for, the waitlist is the single most useful thing you can do: early access, launch pricing locked in, and a real say in what gets built first.

Join the waitlist →

We're building it in the open — the numbers, the screenshots, the stuff that doesn't work yet.