Web Monitoring Methods and Scope Limits

Sep 16, 2026

"What's being written about my brand on the web?" doesn't have as clean an API answer as social media does -- the web isn't a single platform, it's millions of different sites. In this guide we explain the methods Panalora uses for web monitoring and their real limits.

Google Alerts / RSS-based monitoring

The most basic method is checking the RSS feeds news sites and blogs publish themselves, along with Google Alerts results, at regular intervals. This method works reliably when the source itself "announces" new content.

Shared web source discovery

To fill in what Google Alerts/RSS can't catch, Panalora uses a shared, pre-crawled web source pool for companies in the same industry. This provides additional coverage from known, reliable sources without requiring each customer to crawl millions of sites on their own.

Optional paid external search

For customers who want broader, near-real-time web coverage, a paid method that runs through an external search provider is also available. This feature is currently offered only to a limited number of customers as a time- and scope-bounded pilot -- it is not automatically included in the standard package.

Real limits

• Web monitoring is not a system that scans "the entire internet"; it's limited to the sources covered by the three methods above.
• Some sites may not reliably provide the full article text or publication date -- in that case, the missing field is never guessed or filled in.
• Monitoring happens at regular intervals; it is not real-time monitoring.

For the full list of methods and limits, see Data Scope and Limitations; for how news/web monitoring works in general, see Media Tracking.