Readster vs Google Alerts

Google Alerts has been the default way to keep an eye on a name or a topic for twenty years, and it's free. Type a query, pick a frequency, and Google emails you links when new pages match. For a company name, your own name or a rare term, that's often all you need. Google has also started rolling out topic monitoring in AI Mode for free: ask it to keep you updated and it watches the web and sends updates with links.

The trouble starts when you follow more than a couple of things. Each alert is its own email, each email is a list of links, and the same story arrives once for every outlet that covered it. You still open every link to find out what actually happened. Nothing reads your newsletters, and nothing listens to the podcasts where your field argues things out.

Readster starts from the same place — tell it the topics, companies and people you follow and it finds the coverage itself — then does the part alerts leave to you. It reads the articles alongside your feeds, newsletters, podcasts (transcribed) and YouTube channels (from their captions), merges every version of a story into one entry, and writes one brief each morning where every entry links back to its sources. When it says that's everything today, it is.