Google News alerts with real article URLs

Google Alerts emails are hard to automate, and the Google News RSS feed gives you news.google.com/rss/articles/... redirect links instead of the publisher's URL. This tutorial builds a news monitor that:

searches Google News for any keywords, sites, language and country
returns the publisher's real article URL, publisher, date and related coverage
returns only articles you haven't seen yet, on a schedule
delivers them to Slack, email or a spreadsheet

One article looks like this

json

{
  "title": "Trump AI deal rebrands 'artificial intelligence' as 'superintelligence'",
  "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/29/trump-ai-deal-tech-ceos-superintelligence",
  "publisher": "theguardian.com",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-30T17:37:00+00:00",
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "language": "en",
  "country": "US",
  "urlResolved": true
}

Step 1 - choose what to watch

In Google News Scraper:

Search queries take Google News operators: "exact phrase", -exclude, OR, intitle:word. Example: "Acme Corp" -stock.
Topics: Top stories, Business, Technology, Science...
Only from these sites / Never from these sites: e.g. reuters.com, bbc.co.uk.
Published within: past hour, 24 h, week...
Language / Country: de + DE, hi + IN, ja + JP, and so on.

Step 2 - try it from code

python

import os, requests

articles = requests.post(
    "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tacps126~google-news/run-sync-get-dataset-items",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['APIFY_TOKEN']}"},
    json={"queries": ['"generative AI" -stock'], "timeframe": "1d", "maxItems": 50},
    timeout=300,
).json()

for a in articles:
    print(a["publishedAt"][:10], a["publisher"], "-", a["title"])
    print("   ", a["url"])

In my test runs, 100 articles come back in about 11 seconds, publisher URLs included.

Step 3 - turn it into alerts

Save the input as a task and turn on Only new articles. Each run then returns only articles no earlier run delivered, and you pay only for those.
Add a schedule: hourly for breaking news, daily for a digest.
Add an integration: Slack (a message per run), Google Sheets (append rows), email, or a webhook into your own app or RAG index.

Running several monitors? Give each a different Monitor name so they keep separate histories.

Use cases

PR and brand monitoring: your brand, executives, competitors.
Investment research: tickers and company names, filtered to trusted publishers.
AI and RAG pipelines: a fresh, deduplicated stream of article URLs to fetch and embed.
Local news in any language, using the country and language editions.

Cost

About $3 per 1,000 articles, and with "only new" you pay only for articles you haven't already received.

Missing a filter? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.

Google News alerts with real article URLs - to Slack or Google Sheets