Recipes / Track what is being written about your competitors

Track what is being written about your competitors

/stories in hybrid mode. The parameters matter less than the reasoning behind them, so that is most of what is below.

The request

GET /stories
  ?q=<competitor name>
  &mode=hybrid
  &from=<last poll>

# one query per competitor, never an OR query

Why these parameters

One query per competitor rather than a combined OR query. You need to attribute every result to a company, and a merged query makes that ambiguous the moment two of them appear in one article — which, for competitors, is often.

What comes back

Story clusters per company. Comparing outlet counts between competitors over the same window is a rough share-of-attention measure that needs no extra tooling.

How this goes wrong

Treating volume as sentiment. A competitor with a spike in coverage may be having a very bad week. Check tone or read the headlines before drawing a conclusion.

Running it for real

Poll on a schedule with a per-company last-seen timestamp. Track the outlet count trend rather than the raw article count — a competitor whose coverage is broadening across independent publishers is doing something different from one whose own press releases are being picked up.