It's time to ditch Google Alerts

The good thing about Google Alerts is that its free.

Unfortunately there are major show stoppers with Google Alerts:

1. It's not realtime. Its painfully slow and will sometimes alert you days after the keyword has been mentioned
2. It can't find keywords from all major social media websites. This is because X and Meta based properties like Instagram are walled gardens and don't allow Google to scrape their data except under specific circumstances.
3. It's a alerts only tool(similar to F5Bot), there's no UI to view your mentions. You just get email alerts - that's all.
4. Google Alerts is still search-index driven email monitoring. If Google Search has not indexed a page yet, your alert does not exist yet.
5. Google's own Alerts UI is limited to broad source buckets (News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions, Finance) and a simple "Only the best results" filter, so precision and control are limited.

What's the alternative?

If you're serious about finding leads for your product, protecting your brand reputation and tracking your competitors, you need a proper social listening tool.
An alert-only tool like Google Alerts simply won't fit the bill.

Try Mentionkit. Here's what you get with us:

• A nice interface from where you can view and filter your mentions.
• Easy to setup process where we give you a recommendation of keywords to track - so you can get started right away.
• Each mention is scored against your project and given a relevance score. This is great for tracking broad keywords.
• Tracks most major social media platforms. You will be well covered.
• Lastly, we have API support. If you're using Claude/OpenClaw for marketing, this will come handy.

Our plans start from $20 per month, which is very competitive considering most similar tools are priced beyond $100 per month.