Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free Google service that emails you when new pages appear in Google's results for words you choose, like your brand name.
Google Alerts is a free service from Google that emails you when new pages show up in its results for words you choose. You set it up at google.com/alerts, type a search, and pick how often you want to hear about it.
Marketers mostly use it to keep an eye on their own name. It's a cheap way to hear about press coverage, reviews and blog posts that mention you, and to watch what's being written about your competitors.
What people use it for
The most common alert is your brand name in quotes. Add your founder's name, your product names and a competitor or two, and you have a basic media monitor.
SEO teams also use it to find mentions without a link. For example, Kestrel Roasters gets an alert for a food blog that wrote "Kestrel Roasters' single-origin beans are worth the price" but didn't link to Kestrel. A short, friendly email asking the writer to add a link often works, because they already like you.
It isn't complete. Alerts only covers pages Google has indexed and chooses to include, and it misses plenty, especially on social networks and forums. Use it as a tip-off and expect gaps.
Why mentions matter for AI answers
When an AI platform searches the web before answering, it reads pages like the ones Alerts sends you, and the brands those pages name are the ones it tends to repeat. A new review that calls you the best value roaster can end up shaping what ChatGPT or Perplexity says about you.
What Alerts can't tell you is whether any AI answer actually used that page. A mention on a site the platforms never read does little for you there.
In AnswerOrbit
The Movers tab in Sources shows the pages and sites the AI answers to your prompts started using this week, and the ones they used more or less than the week before. It's the AI side of the same question: which new pages are shaping what's said about you. See Sources.