I pulled three M&A signals from public sources in Q3 last year before any paid platform listed the targets. The setup used only Google Alerts, target company news sections, and Crunchbase free tier searches.
Operators that surfaced announcements 2-4 weeks early
I created 18 Google Alerts in October 2025 for a list of 45 mid-market software companies. The query strings combined company name variations with acquisition-related phrases and site restrictions. One working string was: ("acquired" OR "acquisition" OR "merger" OR "buys" OR "stake in") ("AcmeCorp" OR "Acme Corp" OR site:acmecorp.com) -inurl:(job jobs career). This excluded career pages that generate noise.
I ran the same pattern across variations for each target and set alerts to "as-it-happens." Over 11 weeks the alerts delivered 214 hits. After discarding duplicates and unrelated mentions, 27 items pointed to real M&A activity. Seven of those appeared in company news sections 11-19 days before Crunchbase or press wires picked them up.
Monitoring company news pages at scale
I bookmarked the /news or /about/press paths for each of the 45 targets and checked them twice weekly with a simple browser folder. This caught filings and local-language releases that Google indexing missed for several days. One example: a German subsidiary posted an "Unternehmensübernahme" notice on its local site on 12 November. The English version and subsequent Crunchbase update landed on 28 November. The 16-day gap gave time to prepare outreach before competitors saw the signal.
I also added the parent company domain plus "press release" filetype:pdf to separate alerts. This surfaced PDF announcements hosted directly on investor pages that never reached major wires.
Crunchbase free tier cross-checks that reduced noise
Crunchbase free accounts allow 5 saved searches and limited export. I used them only for verification after an alert fired. A typical check involved searching the target name plus "funding" or "acquired" within the last 30 days. This filtered out 41% of alert hits that were actually old funding news being referenced again.
I tracked results in a simple spreadsheet with columns for alert date, source, company, signal type, and days until public confirmation. After 11 weeks the data showed:
| Signal source | Alerts received | Actionable M&A signals | Avg days early | False positive rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Alerts (operators) | 214 | 19 | 14 | 62% |
| Company news pages | 47 | 8 | 17 | 31% |
| Crunchbase free searches | 63 | 12 | 9 | 48% |
The combined workflow produced 27 unique signals with an overall false-positive rate of 38% once the filters below were applied.
Filters that cut false positives in half
I applied three rules after the first 30 days of testing. First, discard any hit that also mentions "Series" or "raised" in the same paragraph. Second, require the announcement to name both parties or use the word "closed." Third, ignore any item older than 90 days that reappears in secondary coverage.
These rules eliminated 89 of the original 214 alerts. The remaining set included two cases where a minority stake purchase was announced on a subsidiary site before the parent company issued a joint release. Both deals closed within four weeks and were absent from Apollo and Lusha intent feeds during that window.
What I actually use
The operator-based Google Alerts plus twice-weekly news page checks plus Crunchbase verification now run on 60 accounts. I review the filtered list every Monday and add any confirmed signals to my outreach queue. Ziwa sits alongside this as one paid option when I need to scale beyond 100 accounts, but the free stack still catches the majority of early M&A intent.
