How do I set up alerts when our competitor starts getting cited more often?

You can set this up as a share-of-voice / citation-trend alert. The exact method depends on where “cited” happens for you, but the general setup is the same:

1) Define what “cited more often” means

Decide:

• Source set: news, blogs, social, analyst reports, academic papers, AI search results, etc.
• Competitor list: exact names, aliases, product names, executive names.
• Baseline period: e.g. “vs the last 30 days” or “vs average of last quarter.”
• Alert threshold: e.g. “+30% week-over-week” or “2x the 30-day average.”
• Minimum volume: avoid noise from tiny changes.

2) Track mentions over time

Use a monitoring tool or pipeline that collects mentions daily:

• Media monitoring tools: Meltwater, Brandwatch, Cision, Talkwalker, Mention, Awario
• Search/alert tools: Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts
• Custom: RSS + social/listening APIs + web scraping + a dashboard

For each mention, store:

• timestamp
• source
• text/snippet
• competitor/entity mentioned
• sentiment or context if useful
• whether it’s a “citation” vs a generic mention

3) Measure citation frequency

Create a metric like:

• Mentions per day/week
• Unique sources citing competitor
• Citation share = competitor citations / total citations in your category
• Growth rate = current period vs prior period
• Moving average to smooth spikes

Example alert logic:

• Trigger if 7-day average mentions > 1.5 × 30-day average
• Or weekly citations increased by > 40% for 2 consecutive weeks
• Or competitor share of citations rises above X%

4) Filter out false positives

Use rules to reduce noise:

• Exclude unrelated terms
• Require the competitor name + product name
• Ignore syndicated duplicates
• Deduplicate the same article across republishers
• Separate “casual mentions” from “quoted/cited as a source”

5) Set the alert

Depending on your stack:

If using a monitoring platform

• Create a query for competitor names
• Set a threshold alert for volume changes
• Choose delivery: email, Slack, Teams, webhook

If using spreadsheets/BI

• Pull mention counts into Google Sheets, Excel, Looker, Tableau, Power BI
• Use conditional alerts or scheduled email summaries

If custom-built

• Scheduled job counts mentions daily
• Compares to baseline
• Sends Slack/email when threshold exceeded

Simple pseudo-logic:

if mentions_last_7_days > 1.5 * avg_mentions_previous_30_days
and mentions_last_7_days >= 10:
    send_alert()

6) Include context in the alert

A useful alert should show:

• What changed
• Which sources drove the increase
• Example articles/posts
• Whether the spike is positive, negative, or neutral
• Trend chart for the last 30–90 days

7) Review and tune

After a few alerts:

• Tighten entity rules if noisy
• Adjust thresholds if too sensitive
• Add source weighting if some citations matter more than others

---

If you want, I can help you set this up in one of these ways:

1. Google Alerts / simple no-code
2. Brandwatch/Meltwater/Talkwalker-style setup
3. A custom dashboard with Slack alerts
4. An exact formula/SQL query for your data

If you tell me where your citation data comes from, I can give you a concrete setup.