What tools do you use to monitor competitors in the news?

• Get email alerts from Google Alerts about each competitor. 
• Set up a Slack channel for competitor news. You can grab Twitter feeds for each competitor through the Slack integration, pipe in the RSS feeds from their blogs, and have customer-facing teams post competitive intel in the channel as well.

You can automate your google searches with Google Alerts.

This is less about automation, and more towards organization, but you can setup a list on Twitter and only include your competitors in that aggregated list. Good luck!

Klue and Crayon are both great tools to collect competitor information from various channels (website update, social media posts, PRs and related mentions) in a single view. This is particularly useful if your PMM team is dedicated to competitive analyses and sends periodic competitive reports to the field. These reports can also show the macro trends of the competitors rather than just product/feature capabilities. Additionally, you can enhance these competitive analyses with competitive information obtained by other teams in the organization added to these platforms. 

Definitely good old Google Alerts is key. Also, social media monitoring with Social Mention. Key: Read their blog. 

For product updates; keep tabs on their website changes with Visualping.io. 

I use Google Alerts and Talkwalker as well as social media channel mentions. 

I use Sift Alerts to track competitor news. It's like Google Alerts, but has more relevant articles and lets you track a bunch of companies in their daily email. 

I've previously tried Competitors.app (https://competitors.app/) as well as Google Alerts but the signal-to-noise ratio was way too low on both. 

Good tips above. Google Alerts is what I always start with since it's free, so at a minimum have this set up and get into a habit of checking the alerts. 

If your company or team has budget, you can look into competitive intelligence services such as https://www.crayon.co/ or https://klue.com/. I haven't used either one before so I can't speak more to it, but it's something I can imagine being quite helpful.