Google Alerts emails you when new web pages matching your search appear in Google’s results. It’s a sensible place to start because:

• It’s free
• It needs no procurement, training or sign-off
• It’s familiar to everyone on the team

For a small team with no budget for monitoring, it’s better than nothing. But “better than nothing” isn’t a high bar when your organisation’s reputation is on the line.

It misses coverage
Google Alerts only picks up what Google indexes and decides to send you. Many teams find stories they never received an alert for. That’s a risk when a local news story about your service can be picked up nationally the same day.

It doesn’t cover broadcast
TV and radio coverage is invisible to Google Alerts. For police forces, fire and rescue services and councils, regional broadcast is often where the most-watched coverage sits.

There’s no social media
Google Alerts can’t tell you how residents are reacting on Facebook, X, Nextdoor or in local community groups. You see the article, but not the conversation it starts.

There’s no sentiment or context
You get a list of links. Working out whether coverage is positive or negative, how far it’s spreading and whether you need to act all falls to your team.

Alerts arrive late
You can choose to receive alerts as they happen, but in practice they can take hours or days. In a fast-moving incident, that’s too slow.

There’s nothing to report
Leaders and elected members increasingly want evidence of what communications achieves. Google Alerts gives you emails, not data. Building a monthly coverage report means copying links into a spreadsheet by hand.

It isn’t shared or auditable
Alerts go to one inbox. If that person is on leave, nobody sees them. There’s no shared view, no audit trail and no way to assign a story to a colleague.

Before you compare tools, agree what your team needs. For most public sector organisations, that includes:

Alternatives fall into three groups. Which one fits depends on your budget, your team and how much is at stake if you miss a story.

Ask your team three questions:

1. Have we ever found out about a story from a resident, a councillor or a journalist before we saw it ourselves?
2. Could we show leaders, today, how our coverage has changed over the last quarter?
3. If a story broke tonight, would we know how the public was reacting by tomorrow morning?

If any answer gives you pause, it’s worth looking at an alternative. You can start by reading what is media monitoring? or comparing media monitoring services vs software.