# Competitive News Tracker

> Track what your competitors are doing in the news. Get sentiment-scored alerts and a weekly digest without checking 50 sites.

Source: https://cotera.co/solutions/marketing/newscatcher-competitive-news-tracker

---

- **Team:** Marketing
- **Tools:** NewsCatcher
- **Difficulty:** medium
- **Setup time:** 10 min
- **Time saved:** 1-2 hrs/week

## How it works
1. **Entity-Filtered Search** — Search by organization name so you only get stories actually about the competitor
2. **Story Deduplication** — Cluster search groups the same story across outlets so you see it once
3. **Sentiment Scoring** — NLP enrichment gives you real sentiment scores, not vibes
4. **Slack + Sheets Delivery** — Digest posted to Slack, full log appended to Google Sheets

## Example requests
- Track news for Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive from the last 7 days
- What have Figma and Canva been in the news for this month?
- Alert me when any competitor raises funding or announces layoffs

## Prompt

```markdown
## Task

Monitor news coverage for a list of competitors using @NewsCatcher/Search Articles with NLP enrichment enabled. Cluster duplicate stories with @NewsCatcher/Search by Clusters, use @google_search for additional context, log findings to @Google Sheets/Append Row, and send a digest to @Slack/Send Message.

**Example:** Track news for Notion, Linear, and ClickUp over the past 7 days and alert me to anything significant.

## Input

The user provides a list of competitor names (or domains) and an optional time range.

**Example:** "Track news for Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive from the last 7 days" or "What have competitors Figma and Canva been up to?"

## Context

### What to Search For

For each competitor, search NewsCatcher with NLP enrichment enabled to capture:
- Product launches and feature announcements
- Funding rounds, acquisitions, and partnerships
- Leadership changes (CEO, CTO, VP-level hires)
- Layoffs, restructuring, or negative press
- Analyst reports and earnings coverage

Use cluster search to deduplicate stories that multiple outlets cover.

### Search Strategy

1. For each competitor, run NewsCatcher Search Articles with entity name filtering and NLP data enabled
2. Run NewsCatcher Search by Clusters for any competitor with more than 10 results to group related coverage
3. Google Search each competitor + "news" for anything NewsCatcher may have missed
4. Score each story by impact: High (funding, acquisition, leadership change), Medium (product launch, partnership), Low (minor feature, opinion piece)
5. Append a row per story to Google Sheets
6. Post a Slack digest grouping stories by competitor and impact level

### What Counts as a Valid Result

- Only include stories actually about the named competitor (not just passing mentions)
- Use NewsCatcher NLP sentiment scores directly rather than guessing sentiment
- When clustering, report the cluster size so the user knows how widely a story was covered
- Flag any story with negative content sentiment as needing attention

## Output

**Competitive News Summary** (for the requested time range)

For each competitor:

**[Competitor Name]** - X stories found

| Date | Headline | Sentiment | Impact | Coverage |
|------|----------|-----------|--------|----------|
| 2024-01-15 | [Headline] | Positive (0.6) | High | 12 outlets |

**Alerts:**
- List any high-impact or negative-sentiment stories that need immediate attention

**Trends:**
- Which competitor is getting the most press right now and why
- Any emerging narratives

**Slack notification sent** and **Google Sheet updated** with full details.
```

## Related reading
- [Automated SEO Competitor Monitoring](https://cotera.co/articles/automated-seo-competitor-monitoring.md)
- [Best Free SEO Competitor Tools](https://cotera.co/articles/best-free-seo-competitor-tools.md)
- [Competitor SEO Tracking Guide](https://cotera.co/articles/competitor-seo-tracking-guide.md)