cotera

Competitive News Tracker

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

Competitive intelligenceNews monitoringSentiment analysisSlack alerts

The Challenge

Keeping tabs on competitor news means juggling Google Alerts, RSS feeds, and Twitter searches that bury you in duplicates. A single funding announcement generates 30+ near-identical articles. This prompt uses NewsCatcher's NLP enrichment and clustering to cut through the noise, score sentiment automatically, and deliver a clean digest to Slack with the stories that actually matter.

What This Prompt Does

Entity-Filtered Search

Search by organization name so you only get stories actually about the competitor

Story Deduplication

Cluster search groups the same story across outlets so you see it once

Sentiment Scoring

NLP enrichment gives you real sentiment scores, not vibes

Slack + Sheets Delivery

Digest posted to Slack, full log appended to Google Sheets

The Prompt

The Prompt

Task

Monitor news coverage for a list of competitors using @NewsCatcher/Search Articles with NLP enrichment enabledName it "NewsCatcher/Search Articles with NLP enrichment enabled" and call it with @NewsCatcher/Search Articles with NLP enrichment enabled. Cluster duplicate stories with @NewsCatcher/Search by ClustersName it "NewsCatcher/Search by Clusters" and call it with @NewsCatcher/Search by Clusters, use @google_searchName it "google_search" and call it with @google_search for additional context, log findings to @Google Sheets/Append RowName it "Google Sheets/Append Row" and call it with @Google Sheets/Append Row, and send a digest to @Slack/Send MessageName it "Slack/Send Message" and call it with @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. This prevents the same fundraising announcement from showing up 40 times.

Search Strategy

  1. For each competitor, run NewsCatcher Search Articles with ORG_entity_name set to the company name, include_nlp_data: true, and the user's time range (default 7d)
  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 (blog posts, press releases on company sites)
  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 with: Date, Competitor, Headline, Sentiment, Impact, Link
  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 (score below -0.3) 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 (e.g., "Company X keeps getting mentioned alongside AI")

Slack notification sent and Google Sheet updated with full details.

Example Usage

Try asking:

  • →"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"