How to set up Google Alerts for companies, and actually see the important ones

Set up Google Alerts for a company: name in quotes at google.com/alerts, Show options, Create Alert. Six alerts founders should use, and why some never arrive.

By Al Mujahid Khan, Co-Founder & CEO, OLL.E

Published October 31, 2026

To set up Google Alerts for a company, go to google.com/alerts, type the company name in quotes, click Show options, set how often and which sources, then click Create Alert. That takes two minutes. Picking the six or so alerts that are worth having, and then actually seeing the important one on the day it lands, is what the rest of this post covers.

One note for iPhone owners before we start. Google Alerts arrive as ordinary email, so everything in the last section of this post works on an iPhone the same way it does on Android. No keyring, no extra hardware. (OLL.E only needs its PinG keyring on iPhone when you want it to watch other apps' notifications, and alerts aren't that.)

How do I set up Google Alerts for a company?

You need a Google account. Do this on a computer; it is easier to see the options.

1. Open google.com/alerts and sign in with the Google account whose inbox should get the emails.
2. In the box at the top, where Google asks for a topic you want to follow, type the company name inside quotes, for example "Northpeak Logistics".
3. Click Show options. If you skip this, you get the defaults, which are fine for a test and wrong for a competitor.
4. Set How often, Sources, Language, Region and How many (the table below has what I pick for a company).
5. Check which account gets the alert, then click Create Alert.

Why the quotes? Google Search treats a phrase in quotes as an exact match, so "Northpeak Logistics" doesn't send you every article that mentions logistics. Companies with common-word names need this more than anyone.

Every company in this post is made up, by the way.

To change an alert later, go back to Google Alerts, click Edit next to it, change what you need and click Update Alert. To stop one, click Delete, or click Unsubscribe at the bottom of any alert email.

Which Google Alerts should a founder or salesperson set up?

I'd start with six. More than that and the emails turn into noise you skim, which defeats the point. The words outside the quotes are ordinary search words, so treat them as a nudge toward the kind of article you want, not a hard filter.

1. "Your Company Name". Your own name, set to Automatic sources and daily. A customer complaining on a forum, or a journalist who got your pricing wrong. You want both, and you want them before your investors forward them to you.
2. "Your Founder Name", if anyone ever quotes you. Same settings.
3. "Brightwave" pricing for each serious competitor. This is the google alerts for competitors setup most people want. News and Blogs as sources, as-it-happens. When a rival raises prices, the week after is the best week you will have to win their unhappy customers.
4. "Northpeak Logistics" funding for your top prospects. A company that just raised money has a budget and a board asking what it will be spent on. One alert per prospect, News only.
5. "Northpeak Logistics" hires. A new head of sales or a new CFO often means old vendors get reviewed, and you want to be in the inbox of that new person in their first month.
6. "Brightwave" acquired. This one almost never fires. When it does, their customers start looking around within days and none of them will email you to say so.

Paid media-monitoring tools search more places and add dashboards and reports, and if press coverage is your actual job they are worth a look; for one person tracking two dozen company names, Google Alerts does enough.

How often does Google Alerts send emails?

As often as you tell it to. The How often option has three settings: as-it-happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week. Google says you get an email whenever it finds matching results, so a quiet company can go weeks with nothing at all, even on as-it-happens.

Weekly is tempting because it keeps the inbox calm. I wouldn't: a weekly alert works like a newsletter. If the news is that a prospect raised money on Tuesday, finding out the following Monday means three competitors have already sent the congratulations email. Weekly is fine for your own brand mentions. For anything you want to act on, set as-it-happens and solve the noise problem a different way.

Why am I not getting Google Alerts?

Google's own help page lists three checks. Go through them in order.

• You're signed in to a different Google account than the one that made the alert. Sign out and back in at google.com/alerts and see whether your alerts are listed.
• The alert has gone missing or points somewhere else. Make sure the alert still exists under Google Alerts and sends to the right address.
• Your mailbox is full, or the emails are landing in spam. In Gmail, Google suggests adding googlealerts-noreply@google.com to your contacts.

One more of my own. If a small company never triggers anything, switch How many from Only the best results to All results and see if that changes it. And if you set up a Gmail filter months ago that skips the inbox for anything from Google, that filter is quietly eating your alerts.

Can I get Google Alerts on my phone?

Yes, because they are just emails. They arrive in the Gmail app like anything else. If you want them to stand out, the Gmail app lets you set notifications to High priority only (on Android: Menu, Settings, your account, Email notifications; on iPhone: Menu, Settings, Notifications, Email notifications).

This is where most complaints that Google Alerts is not working really come from. The alert email is the easy part. Noticing the one that matters is the hard part. Your Northpeak funding alert buzzes the same way as a receipt from the coffee shop. It sits in the inbox at 9:40 and you see it at 4, or Friday, by which point Google did its job perfectly and it made no difference to you. Turning on High priority only helps a little, but Google decides what counts as high priority, and it has no idea that Northpeak is the deal your quarter depends on. A filter that labels everything from googlealerts-noreply@google.com helps you find alerts later. Neither one makes your phone do anything different at the moment the right one arrives.

Making the one alert that matters ring your phone

If your alerts go to a Gmail account, OLL.E can watch them with nothing extra on iPhone or Android. You write a sentence saying what you care about, and when an alert says a prospect raised money or a competitor changed its prices, it phones you. You can add a line for news about your own company too. It can send you a short summary of what the alert found, and forward the email to a teammate who should follow up. The alert about a competitor's webinar stays quiet in a Shortlist that never makes a sound.

To be clear about what it isn't: OLL.E doesn't create Google Alerts for you, and it doesn't crawl the web on its own. You still set the alerts up with the steps above. It doesn't watch websites.

Connect Gmail, type one watch for your prospect alerts and one for competitor pricing, and leave everything else to land silently. It works the same on iPhone and Android because it reads your mailbox, not your phone's notifications. It reads only what the watch needs and stores no email content. Start with two watches and see which calls you actually pick up; the free plan is enough for a handful of alerts.