What Google Alerts is good at
- It's free, and takes a minute to set up.
- It searches the whole web, so it can find mentions of your name, your company or a topic on sites you've never heard of.
- It's good for news: a new article about a competitor, a product launch, or your brand.
- You choose how often: as it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week.
What it can't do
- Tell you when a page you already know changes. If a competitor raises a price on its pricing page, there's no new page for Google to find, so there's no alert.
- Watch one part of a page, such as a price box or a job list.
- Say what changed. An alert is a link to a search result, not a before-and-after.
- Promise to catch everything. By default it sends “only the best results”, and it only knows about pages Google has already found, which can take days.
Use both: they do different jobs
- Mentions of your company in the news: Google Alerts.
- New blog posts about a topic you follow: Google Alerts, or the blog's own feed.
- A competitor's pricing page: ChangeGist.
- A supplier's terms, a council notice or a careers page: ChangeGist.
- A product that's out of stock: ChangeGist.
Why people end up looking for an alternative
A common story: someone sets up a Google Alert for a competitor's name, hoping to hear about price changes, and hears nothing. The prices did change, but Google Alerts was never going to notice, because it looks for new pages, not edits. A change monitor visits the page itself on a schedule, compares it with the last copy and tells you what moved, like “Pro plan went up from $49 to $59”.
Try it side by side
Keep your Google Alerts for news and mentions, and add the few pages you check by hand to ChangeGist. It's free for 7 days, no card needed. Not sure when a page last changed? Our free “When was this page last updated?” tool will tell you.