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Media monitoring for small teams: a setup that costs little or nothing.

October 5, 2026 · 8 min read

Enterprise media monitoring tools are built for communications departments with a budget to match, and they're often priced per seat on annual contracts. A startup, a small agency or a three-person comms team usually needs something simpler: know when the company, a competitor or the industry is in the news, and make sure the right person sees it. Here's a practical setup that does that in an afternoon.

What you actually need to monitor

Before choosing any tool, write down what you'd act on. For most small teams it falls into four groups:

1. You: your company, product names, and founders or spokespeople.
2. Competitors: launches, funding, hires, outages and lawsuits.
3. Your industry: regulation, market moves and the trends your customers read about.
4. Specific sources: the handful of trade publications, newsrooms and blogs that matter in your space.

Keep the list short. Ten well-chosen topics that someone reads beat fifty that fill an inbox nobody opens.

The setup, step by step

The steps below use Plainradar, which searches news sites and blogs live, groups duplicate coverage into one story, and has an AI check confirm each story is relevant before you see it. The same approach works with other tools, adjusted to what they offer.

Step 1: test each topic as a search

Type each topic into the search box exactly as you'd describe it to a colleague: Acme Corp news, EU rules on AI in hiring, battery recycling startups. You'll see the last 24 hours of verified stories in a few seconds. If the results are right, that's your tracker. If they're too broad, make the wording more specific. If they're too thin, make it broader or switch the language to "All languages".

A tip for company names that are also common words (Apple, Notion, Linear): add context, as in Linear, the project management software company. The search understands meaning, so the extra words help instead of hurting.

Step 2: add noise filters

Every topic has its own recurring noise. Instead of complex exclusion syntax, write up to five filters in plain words:

• "Skip opinion pieces and listicles"
• "Nothing about job listings or hiring ads"
• "Only news from Europe"
• "Ignore stock price movement articles"

Filters don't use credits, so it's worth trying a few until the results look like what you'd forward to a colleague.

Step 3: turn the searches into trackers

Press Track this topic. A tracker repeats the search on a schedule and only reports stories it hasn't shown you before. Choose the frequency based on how fast you need to react:

Each topic tracker run uses one credit, so a daily tracker costs about 30 credits a month. That's another reason to keep the list short and use hourly runs only where speed really matters.

Step 4: follow specific websites for free

Some sources matter regardless of the topic: a competitor's newsroom and blog, the main trade publication in your niche, a regulator's press page. For those, create a site tracker: paste up to 20 website addresses and Plainradar finds each site's RSS or Atom feed and collects everything new they publish. Not sure which sites matter? Explore suggests the best-matching news sites for a topic from its index (one credit per Explore).

Site trackers don't use credits, so this part of your monitoring is free.

Step 5: deliver it where your team works

The best monitoring is the one people actually read. Pick the delivery that fits each tracker:

• Email for personal trackers, like the founder's own name or a topic only you follow.
• Google Sheet for a shared log. Share the sheet with Plainradar's address, paste the link, and each new story is added as a row with its headline, link, source, publication date, number of sources and summary. It's easy to filter, comment on and turn into a monthly coverage report.
• Webhook for Slack, Teams or your CRM. Each run that finds something posts the new stories as signed JSON to your URL. Point it at Zapier, Make or n8n to forward it to a channel, or at your own endpoint.

Whatever you choose, every story also appears under My trackers on the site, so nothing depends on a single inbox.

Step 6: give it a 15-minute weekly review

Once a week, someone skims the sheet or channel and asks three questions: Did we miss something we heard about elsewhere? Is a tracker sending things nobody reads? Is there a new competitor or topic to add? Adjust the topic wording or filters and move on. This is the habit that turns a pile of alerts into actual monitoring.

A sample setup for a 5-person startup

That's four topic trackers, about 150 credits a month, plus site tracking that uses no credits at all. Many teams start with even less and add trackers once the habit sticks.

What this setup won't cover

Be clear about the gaps so nobody is surprised:

• Social media. Plainradar reads news sites and blogs, not X, LinkedIn, Reddit or TikTok. For those you need a social listening tool.
• TV, radio and print. Broadcast monitoring and print clippings are still the domain of specialised agencies.
• Paywalled full text. You get the headline, summary and link that the publisher shares. Reading the full article may need a subscription.
• Analytics. No sentiment scores, reach estimates or share-of-voice charts. A Google Sheet log gets you surprisingly far, but it's not a dashboard.

If you need those, it may be time for an enterprise tool. Until then, a focused setup like this covers what most small teams act on.