Get a Slack alert when your brand is in the news

By Keencrest · 2026-11-01

Data: The GDELT Project. GDELT permits commercial use and redistribution with a citation and a link, and every row the Actor returns carries that citation. The Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by GDELT.

This guide wires the GDELT News Monitor to Slack, so a message arrives when new articles mention your brand. Its watch mode remembers the last article it returned, so each hourly run sends only what is new, and an hour with no news posts nothing and costs nothing. Background: how the feed and watch mode work.

Option 1: n8n (Slack message)

Create a Slack incoming webhook for the channel you want (api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks) and copy its URL.
In n8n, Workflows, Import from file: n8n-gdelt-brand-alert-slack.json. Details on the template page.
Create a Header Auth credential (Name Authorization, Value Bearer plus your own Apify token) and pick it in the Apify node.
Edit keywords in the request body, paste the webhook URL into the last node and activate the workflow.

Option 2: Google Sheets (a log you can filter)

If you want a running table instead of a chat message, paste sheets-gdelt-mentions.gs into Extensions, Apps Script, as described on its template page. It appends every new article as a row. You can then add a Slack notification from the sheet with Slack's own Google Sheets workflow, if you prefer.

What a message looks like

One message per run: a count line, up to 15 lines of linked title, source domain and tone, a note when more were returned, and the GDELT citation. The message format comes from the template's Code node; check it in n8n's test run against your own keywords, because the content depends on what the news is that hour.

Keep the bill and the noise down

Cost is $0.002 per article returned. A brand with 20 mentions an hour is about $1 a day; a rare brand costs cents. Both templates send maxTotalChargeUsd=1 as a per-run cap and maxItems 100.
Use excludeKeywords for look-alike words and set languages to cut other-language noise.
Keywords match whole words in title, URL, people and organizations, and GDELT lags the original story by roughly 15 to 30 minutes, so this is an alert, not a real-time wire.
Give each alert its own watchName. Two alerts that share a name and filters share one position and will each miss articles the other consumed.

Not tested: the Slack post and the Google Sheets write, which need your own accounts. The request and the message formatting were run against a mock response; the Actor's watch mode itself was tested on the Apify platform (30 articles, then 725 with none repeated, then 0).

Try it: GDELT News Monitor on Apify. $0.002 per article returned, no start fee; reading files and filtering is free. The Apify free plan includes monthly credit, so a test run costs nothing out of pocket.

Related guides

All Keencrest guides