News Monitoring MCP Server

The News MCP server thatreads 150,000+ outlets for you

Octolens monitors news sites and blogs for your keywords — from national press to niche trade outlets — filters the noise with AI, and serves clean mentions to Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor over MCP. Available on the Scale plan.

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5-minute setup • OAuth sign-in, read-only • News coverage on the Scale plan

Your AI assistant · octolens connected

Any press coverage of us or our category since yesterday?

octolens · list_relevant_mentionssource: news · 2 results

TechWire Daily · trade pressindustry

“The tools reshaping how companies listen to their markets” — your category gets a full section, two vendors quoted.

Article · published 6h ago

regional business daily · syndicated wire storycompetitor_mention

A funding story about a competitor names you as “the developer-focused alternative” in paragraph four.

Article · syndicated to 12 outlets overnight

The TechWire piece quotes two competitors but not you — the reporter's beat matches your story from last month. Want me to draft a short note to them with your data point?

Trusted by brands people talk about online

The problem

Press Coverage Has No API

The moment a story mentions you, the clock starts — on corrections, on outreach, on the syndication wave. And there's no single place to watch.

150,000 outlets, zero shared interface

News lives across national press, trade publications, regional dailies, and blogs — each with its own site, none with a monitoring API. Google Alerts samples it late and shallow; watching it properly means crawling at scale.

Aggregator APIs weren't built for brands

News-API services cap requests, delay articles on cheaper tiers, and match keywords without knowing your brand from a common word. You get headlines and links — relevance, sentiment, and dedupe across syndication are your problem.

Stories syndicate while you sleep

One wire story becomes twelve regional copies overnight. If the original got a detail wrong, every copy inherits it — and the window for a correction closes as the wave spreads.

Octolens crawls 150,000+ outlets continuously, matches your keywords, scores every article with AI, and hands your assistant the coverage worth acting on — original stories and their syndication trails.

How it works

From Newsroom to Answer in Your AI Tool

One pipeline: Octolens does the collection and filtering, MCP does the delivery. You just ask.

Add keywords

Your brand, executives, competitors, and the category phrases journalists use — plus negative keywords for noise.

octolens.com → Keywords

Octolens collects

Articles from 150,000+ news outlets and blogs matching your keywords, with a 7-day backfill per keyword and continuous collection after. Real-time on the Scale plan.

150k+ outlets

AI scores everything

Every article arrives scored for relevance and sentiment, tagged with labels like press_coverage, competitor_mention, or industry_news.

"relevanceScore": "high"

Your assistant queries it

23 MCP tools: list and search mentions, run analytics, manage keywords and feeds — from Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor.

list_relevant_mentions

Full tool reference in the MCP docs. The same data is available over the REST API and webhooks — news coverage ships with the Scale plan. Prefer alerts and a feed over an AI assistant? See news monitoring.

Setup

Connected in Five Minutes

No news-API subscriptions or crawlers to run. You need an Octolens account on the Scale plan (news coverage) and an MCP-compatible tool.

Add your keywords in Octolens

Brand, executives, competitors, category terms. News collection (150k+ outlets) starts with a 7-day backfill.

Connect your client

One URL for every tool. Authentication is a browser sign-in to your Octolens account — there's no API key or token to paste.

Ask

Try: “show news mentions from today” — you should see your first scored mentions come back.

Anything not covered here — scopes, all 23 tools, troubleshooting — is in the MCP v2 docs. Setup snippets are also in the app under Settings → MCP.

claude mcp add --transport http octolens \
  "https://app.octolens.com/api/mcp/v2"

# then, inside Claude Code:
/mcp   # → octolens → Authenticate

Run the command, then run /mcp inside Claude Code, select octolens → Authenticate, and sign in when the browser opens.

Verify it works

@octolens show news mentions from today

New keywords can take up to 24 hours to index fully — check mentions in the Octolens dashboard first if nothing comes back.

Prompts to steal

What You'll Actually Ask It

Copy-paste these into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor once you're connected.

Press digestShow news mentions from the last 24 hours, grouped by outlet

Every article that mentioned you since yesterday — nationals, trades, and blogs — in one answer instead of forty tabs.

Coverage gapsWhich outlets covered our category this month without mentioning us?

The journalists already writing about your space are the warmest PR targets you have. This is the pitch list, pre-qualified.

Syndication watchTrack the syndication trail of this story: [paste article]

See how far a story spread and where. Essential when the original needs a correction — or deserves an amplification push.

Share of voiceCompare press coverage of us vs [competitor] this quarter

Volume, outlets, and sentiment side by side — the report your comms team builds by hand, answered in one prompt.

TriageShow negative or critical articles from the last week

Critical coverage compounds through syndication and SEO. The earlier comms knows, the more options they have.

Reporter outreachDraft a note to the journalist who wrote this: [paste article]

Draft in your assistant, send it yourself — a relevant, non-pushy note to a reporter on your beat is how the next story includes you.

Try these on your own mentions

7-day free trial · No credit card required

Beyond chat

MCP Is One Door Into the Same Data

Octolens is the data layer for what people say online. Your assistant queries it over MCP — your team and your agents can consume it everywhere else too.

Webhooks → your stack

Push instead of poll: scored News mentions delivered to Slack or your own endpoint as they're found. Wire buying-intent posts straight into your CRM.

Explore webhooks →

Agent skills

Ready-made playbooks agents can run over the MCP server — mentions to Linear issues, churn signals to CS, public conversations to pipeline.

Browse agent skills →

API → your product

The same News data over one REST endpoint with one schema across 15+ sources. Build monitoring into your own product or internal tools.

Build with Octolens →

Honest comparison

Your Three Options for News via MCP

There's no official API for the world's press. Here's how the workarounds compare.

	Octolens MCP	News-API aggregator + DIY MCP	Google Alerts
Outlet coverage	150,000+ outlets & blogs	Varies by provider & tier	Sampled, not comprehensive
Freshness	Real-time (Scale plan)	Delayed on cheaper tiers	Hours to days late
AI relevance & sentiment scoring	Built-in	You build it	None — raw keyword match
Syndication dedupe & trails	Yes	You build it	Twelve emails for one story
Works in Claude / ChatGPT / Cursor	Native via MCP	After you build the server	No
Alerts & delivery	Slack, webhooks, email + MCP	You build it	Email only
Other platforms via the same server	15+ sources incl. social	News only	Web only, loosely
Cost	Scale plan — $599/mo ($499/mo annual)	API subscription + your time	Free — you get what you pay for

Google Alerts is fine for a personal name. Aggregator APIs are fine if you enjoy building dedupe pipelines. If press coverage moves your pipeline or your reputation, monitor it properly.

FAQ

News MCP Server & Monitoring, Answered

Coverage, plans, and setup — everything about monitoring the press from Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor.

News coverage (150,000+ outlets and blogs) is a Scale-plan source — $599/mo, or $499/mo billed annually. The MCP server itself is available on every plan; it's the news source that ships with Scale. Social sources like Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and Hacker News are on all plans.

150,000+ news sites and blogs — national and international press, trade and industry publications, regional outlets, and independent blogs. If your keyword appears in an article, it surfaces regardless of the outlet's size.

Google Alerts samples the web on its own schedule, matches keywords with no relevance or sentiment scoring, and sends a separate email for every syndicated copy of the same story. Octolens is comprehensive, scored, deduplicated across syndication, and queryable from your AI tools instead of your inbox.

Yes — when a wire story spreads across outlets, you can see the trail rather than twelve seemingly separate mentions. That matters most when the original needs a correction before the copies multiply.

News collection runs real-time on the Scale plan — articles surface as the crawler finds them, typically well inside the window where a comms response is still useful.

Yes. Competitor names, executive names, and category terms all work as keywords — competitor funding coverage and category roundups that omit you are some of the most actionable articles you'll catch.

Claude Code, Claude Desktop and Web, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any other MCP-compatible client. It's one remote server URL with OAuth sign-in — there's no API key to manage and nothing to run locally.

Every new keyword gets a 7-day backfill, then collects continuously — your archive builds from the day you add a keyword. That's enough history for coverage trends and share-of-voice over time.

News coverage on the Scale plan

Give your AI tools ears on the press

News monitoring across 150,000+ outlets ships with the Scale plan. Book a demo to see it on your brand, or start the free trial to test the pipeline on social sources first.

Start 7-day free trial Book a demo

No credit card required · API access on all plans · Cancel anytime