How to track press coverage after you pitch

The simplest way to find out when a publication writes about your company is to set a news alert for your company name and check the outlets you pitched every few days. Most reporters won't email you when the story goes live. Some do, especially if you've built a relationship, but many treat publishing as the end of their part of the job, so tracking the coverage is up to you.

The free tool most people start with is Google Alerts. You create an alert at google.com/alerts for your company name, your product name, and the name of your announcement, then choose how often it sends results and whether it covers news only or the whole web. Talkwalker Alerts works much the same way. Paid media databases such as Muck Rack, Cision, and Meltwater include coverage monitoring and can produce a report of everything that ran. Alongside an alert, it's worth bookmarking the author page of each reporter you pitched, because every outlet lists a reporter's latest stories there with dates.

Each of these routes catches some coverage and misses some. A news alert only finds stories that use your exact words, so a piece that calls your product "the new scheduling tool from [your company]" may slip past an alert set for the product's name. A story behind a paywall may never show its full text to a search engine. A mention in a reporter's newsletter or a roundup post often isn't indexed as news at all. And timing is unpredictable. A reporter who liked your pitch may hold it for a trend piece three weeks later, long after you stopped checking.

There's also the matching problem. When an alert fires, it tells you a page mentions you. It doesn't tell you whether this is the story you pitched, written by the reporter you pitched, or your own press release reposted on a distribution site. Those mean very different things for the campaign.

A good result is a short, complete record of what ran because of your pitches: each story, the reporter and outlet behind it, the pitch it came from, the date it ran, and whether it links to your site. With that record, you can thank the reporter, share the story while it's fresh, and know which angles worked for next time.

Kite does that tracking for you. It watches the places your coverage is likely to appear, matches each new story to your pitch list, and starts the follow-up work as soon as a story runs.

If Kite sent the pitches for you, it already has the list of reporters, outlets, angles, and send dates. Ask it to watch for what comes back:

"Watch for coverage from the launch pitches we sent this week and let me know when anything runs."

When the pitches go out, Kite may also offer to watch for the coverage on its own, as one closing line after it reports what was sent. Say yes, and it sets up the watch.

If you pitched the press yourself, share your list in the conversation. A spreadsheet or a pasted table works, as long as it has each reporter's name and outlet:

"Here's who I pitched about our Series A. Tell me when any of them write about it."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. From that research, it already knows your company name, your products, your founders, and your website, so it can propose the words to watch for without a long brief. It shows you the terms and the outlets it plans to watch. Confirm them or adjust them, and Kite sets up the watches.

You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack. If your team has added Kite to Slack, coverage alerts arrive in the Slack thread where you asked. Otherwise, Kite emails them to the person who set up the watch. You don't need a media monitoring subscription, because Kite searches the web with its own built-in tools.

Kite starts from your pitch list and the story you pitched, because those tell it exactly what coverage would look like. A reporter writing about your launch will name your company, and probably your product, your founder, or a figure from the pitch, such as "40 clinics recovered an average of six appointments a week." Kite collects those terms from the pitch and from its research on your company.

It then chooses terms that only describe you. If your company name is also an ordinary word, Kite pairs it with your product name or your website address so the watch looks for you instead of the word. If your request doesn't settle the terms and Kite can't work them out from what it knows, it asks you before it creates anything.

Kite sets up two watches, because coverage shows up in two different ways.

The first is a news watch across the whole web. It searches for recent news naming any of your terms, which catches coverage from outlets you didn't pitch, such as a trade newsletter that picked up the story from a reporter you did pitch.

The second watch is held to the outlets you pitched. Kite lists the publications' websites, up to ten in one watch, and searches only those sites for stories about your news. This watch catches pieces that describe your company in different words than your alert would expect, because it looks at fewer places and can judge each new story on those sites against the pitch you sent. When you pitched more than ten outlets, Kite puts the ones most likely to run the story in this watch and relies on the news watch for the rest.

Kite checks each watch about every six hours, and you can ask for checks as often as once an hour. Each check looks only at what has appeared since the last one, so a story that stays near the top of search results doesn't set off a second alert. After a watch reports a story, it rests for a day before checking again, and the next check still picks up anything published during the rest.

Coverage from a pitch can take weeks to appear, so the watches stay on until you stop them. Ask Kite to pause a watch, change its terms, or stop it for good when the campaign is over. You can also ask why a watch exists, and Kite tells you the request it was set up from.

Kite reads each new result and decides whether it's a real story about your company before it says anything. A page that only shares a word with your company name gets dropped. So does your own press release reposted on a distribution site, because that's distribution you paid for or sent yourself, not a reporter's coverage.

When a story passes, Kite opens the article and reads it. It notes the outlet, the headline, the author, the date it ran, and what the story says about your company, including any figures or quotes it attributes to you. It also notes whether the story links to your website, since a link from a respected publication helps your search rankings and gives readers a way to find you.

Then Kite matches the story to your pitch list. When the author is a reporter you pitched, the alert says so and names the pitch and the angle that story came from. When the story comes from someone you didn't pitch, Kite says that too, because it usually means the news spread from another outlet's story.

Before it alerts you, Kite checks what your team already knows. It reads your team's knowledge base and recent conversations, and if someone has already shared the story, Kite stays quiet. When other outlets reprint the same story days later, Kite treats it as the story you've already heard about and only speaks up when something new appears, such as a correction or a follow-up piece.

Some reporters do write back to say the story is live, or to ask a last question before it runs. If the pitches went out from your team's Kite email address, those replies reach Kite directly. Kite reads each one, tells you, and drafts a response for you to approve.

If the pitches went out from your own Gmail or Outlook, connect that account so Kite can watch your inbox. Every two hours, Kite looks at new mail and messages your team owner about anything that needs attention, such as a reporter asking for a photo before the story publishes. Kite only reads that inbox unless a team member allows it to reply.

Each alert gives you the story and the next step in one message. It names the outlet and the reporter, links to the story, summarizes what it says about your company, and says which pitch it came from. If your team's records name an owner for press, Kite names that person.

Kite then drafts the follow-up work the story calls for, and each draft waits for your approval:

• A thank-you to the reporter. Kite writes a short note and, when the pitch went out by email, sends it as a reply in the original pitch thread once you approve, so the reporter sees it alongside the conversation that led to the story.
• A post sharing the story. Kite writes a LinkedIn or X post that links to the article and credits the reporter and outlet. With a connected social account, it publishes the post once you approve.
• A press page update. When Kite hosts your website, it drafts the addition to your press or newsroom page with the outlet, headline, and link. The change goes live when you approve it.
• A correction request. When a story gets a fact wrong, such as your pricing or a customer's name, Kite drafts a polite correction for the reporter with the accurate detail.

When you ask, or when the campaign winds down, Kite reports on everything the pitches produced. The report lists each reporter you pitched and what happened: no reply, a reply, an interview, or a published story with its link and date. It shows which angles led to coverage and which drew no response, and which stories link to your site.

Kite saves what it learned to your team's knowledge base, including which reporters covered you and which angles worked. The next time you have news, Kite starts the media list from the reporters who wrote about you before. If you track your visibility in AI answers with Kite, it can also check whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude start citing the new coverage when people ask about your category.

When the watches are running, you have a reliable view of what your pitches produced, and the follow-up work is ready when each story runs.