Build a Slack Bot That Alerts You When Your Competitor Launches a New Page

In this tutorial, we’ll build a simple system that uses SerpApi's Google Search API to detect when a new competitor domain URL appears in search results and then sends an alert to a Slack channel.

Code examples for blog post: https://serpapi.com/blog/build-a-slack-bot-that-alerts-you-when-your-competitor-launches-a-new-page

Getting Started

To start, you’ll need a SerpApi account, a Slack workspace (and a Slack Incoming Webhook URL), and Python installed.

Create a Slack Webhook

1. Go to Slack → Apps
2. Search for Incoming Webhooks
3. Create a webhook for your channel

You will get a Webhook URL like: https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXXX/XXXX/XXXX

Save this, as we'll need it later.

Code Related Setup Steps

1. Install serpapi (SerpApi's new Python library), the python-dotenv library, and the schedule library in your environment:

pip install serpapi python-dotenv schedule

2. To begin scraping data, create a free account on serpapi.com. You'll receive 250 free search credits each month to explore the API. Get your SerpApi API Key from this page.

3. [Optional but Recommended] Set your API key in an environment variable, instead of directly pasting it in the code. Refer here to understand more about using environment variables. For this tutorial, I have saved the API key in an environment variable named "SERPAPI_API_KEY" in my .env file.

4. [Optional but Recommended] Set up your Slack Webhook URL as an an environment variable as well. In your .env file, this will look like this:

SERPAPI_API_KEY=<YOUR PRIVATE API KEY>
SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL=<YOUR PRIVATE WEBHOOK URL>

5. Set constants as needed in the code file alerts_for_new_competitor_pages.py:

SERPAPI_KEY = os.environ["SERPAPI_API_KEY"] -> Set the environment variable OR replace with your API key if you're not using environment variables
DOMAIN = "" -> Add your domain
DB_FILE = "known_urls.json"
SLACK_WEBHOOK = os.environ["SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL"] -> Set the environment variable OR replace with your API key if you're not using environment variables

Run The Code

Head to the project folder and run the code file using python alerts_for_new_competitor_pages.py

This will start the scheduler. To keep the tasks running even after you close your terminal or IDE, you can choose to run the script as a persistent background process. For linux/macOS, use disown to detach the script from the terminal, e.g., python3 script.py & disown.

If you want to just test your implementation, comment the scheduler related lines and just add a line to call the check_new_pages() function.

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Sample Output

Once this is set up, your Slack channel will receive alerts like this once a day:

🚨 New competitor pages detected:

https://competitor.com/products/ai-assistant

https://competitor.com/features/fast-mode

I ran the code twice for the domain serpapi.com. The first time, I got some new pages and the next time, since all the webpages were already seen, I got a message letting me know that no new pages were detected. These were the alerts I received:

This lets you instantly spot new product launches, new feature releases, and new landing pages which are showing up in search results for any company.

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