Build a Slack Bot That Alerts You When a New Company Ranks for Keywords

In this tutorial, we’ll build a simple system that detects when a new brand ranks for a tracked keyword and send an alert to a Slack channel.

Code examples for blog post: https://serpapi.com/blog/build-a-slack-bot-that-alerts-you-when-a-new-company-ranks-for-keywords/

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's new Python serpapi library, the python-dotenv library, tldextract library (for parsing the domains from URLs), and the schedule library in your environment:

pip install serpapi python-dotenv schedule tldextract

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 get_companies_ranking_for_keywords.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
queries = [] # List of queries for which you want to find the updated domains
DB_FILE = "known_domains.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 get_companies_ranking_for_keywords.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_for_new_domains() function.

Sample Output

I ran the code twice with QUERY_LIST = ["ai images tool", "ai image generators", "image creation ai tools"]

The first time, I got some new pages (because a few new companies started ranking for the queries since when I ran it last) 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:

You can use this to instantly find out when new companies start ranking for important keywords that matter for your brand.