Find the best way to monitor obituaries
Compare ObituaryMonitor to manual searching and Google Alerts. See which approach fits your needs.
Understanding Your Obituary Monitoring Options
You have three main options for tracking obituary notices. Manual searching requires daily website visits. Free alert services like Google Alerts offer automation with limited coverage. Dedicated platforms like ObituaryMonitor provide comprehensive, purpose-built monitoring.
Obituary publication in the United States is highly fragmented. There are over 19,000 funeral homes. Add 1,200 daily newspapers and countless memorial sites. No single source covers everything. About 30% of deaths never produce a public obituary. Those that do appear across thousands of different websites.
This guide compares time investment, coverage, accuracy, and cost. We help you choose the right approach for your situation. This matters whether you are monitoring relatives, tracking clients, or conducting research.
Manual Searching
Checking obituary websites daily yourself
Pros
- Free
- You control which sites to check
Cons
- Time-consuming (15-30 min/day)
- Easy to forget or miss days
- Can't check all 2,500+ sources
- No alerts—you have to look
- Mental burden of remembering
Google Alerts
Email alerts for web mentions
Pros
- Free
- Automated
- Easy setup
Cons
- Misses most obituary sources
- High false positive rate
- No SMS alerts
- No confidence scoring
- Common names generate spam
ObituaryMonitor
Purpose-built obituary monitoring
Pros
- 2,500+ obituary sources
- 90%+ confidence matching
- Email and SMS alerts
- Location and relative matching
- Set and forget—zero daily effort
- Private and secure
Cons
- Paid service ($14.99/mo)
The Reality of Manual Obituary Searching
Manual searching means visiting funeral home websites and newspaper obituary pages yourself. You check memorial aggregators regularly for new notices. This takes discipline. Obituaries appear unpredictably. Some vanish from websites within days.
Most people underestimate the challenge. Checking just ten sources daily takes 15-30 minutes. That covers a tiny fraction of 2,500+ obituary sources. Miss a few days and you might miss the obituary entirely. Many sites archive old notices quickly.
The mental burden adds up. You must remember to check daily. Track which sources you have visited. Scan dozens of unfamiliar names with focus. Most people cannot sustain this for weeks or months.
Why Google Alerts Falls Short for Obituary Monitoring
Google Alerts sends free email notifications when web content matches your search terms. It works well for tracking company news. For obituaries, it has serious limitations.
The first problem is incomplete coverage. Google does not crawl all obituary sources frequently. Many funeral home websites get indexed rarely. Local newspaper obituary pages may not appear at all. A large percentage of obituaries never trigger Google Alerts.
The second problem is noise. A Google Alert for "John Smith" generates many irrelevant results. News articles. Social media posts. Business mentions. Filtering these takes time. It defeats the purpose of automation.
Google Alerts also lacks location filtering and confidence scoring. You cannot distinguish between different people with the same name. This is a major problem for common names.
Feature-by-feature comparison
See exactly what each method offers
| Feature | ObituaryMonitor | Manual Search | Google Alerts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sources monitored | 2,500+ obituary sources | 1-5 sites you remember to check | Limited web results |
| Monitoring frequency | 24/7 continuous | When you remember | Once daily at most |
| False positive rate | Very low (90%+ confidence) | You filter manually | High (many irrelevant results) |
| Time investment | 2 min setup, then zero | 15-30 min/day per person | 5 min setup + daily filtering |
| SMS text alerts | Yes, instant | No | No |
| Match confidence scoring | Yes, 90%+ threshold | Your judgment | No |
| Location filtering | State, city, county | Manual review | Limited |
| Relative matching | Yes, improves accuracy | Not available | Not available |
| Coverage completeness | Comprehensive | Incomplete | Very incomplete |
Time and cost analysis
What does manual monitoring really cost you?
Manual Searching (per person)
ObituaryMonitor
Bottom line: Even at minimum wage, manual searching costs more than ObituaryMonitor—and covers far fewer sources.
Who Needs Automated Obituary Monitoring?
Certain professionals depend on timely death notifications. Delays create legal, financial, or ethical problems.
Estate and probate attorneys must initiate trust administration promptly. File court documents. Meet creditor deadlines. Missed deadlines mean malpractice risk.
Private investigators waste resources on deceased subjects. Verify status before deploying field resources. Avoid embarrassing family contacts.
Insurance companies benefit from proactive claims processing. Know about deaths before claims are filed. Faster beneficiary outreach. Fewer unclaimed benefits.
Genealogy researchers track elderly relatives. Funerals bring family together. These are opportunities to preserve oral histories.
Why automated monitoring beats manual checking
You can't check every source
There are over 2,500 obituary sources across funeral homes, newspapers, and aggregators. Manual checking covers maybe 1% of them.
Life gets in the way
Vacations, sick days, busy weeks—manual checking requires daily discipline. Automation never takes a day off.
Timing matters
Obituaries can appear and disappear from websites. 24/7 monitoring catches notices that brief manual checks miss.
Making the Right Choice for Your Situation
The best obituary monitoring approach depends on your specific circumstances, including how many people you need to monitor, how critical timely notification is, and how much time you can realistically dedicate to manual checking.
If you only need to check occasionally and are not concerned about missing notices, manual searching of a few key sources may suffice. However, if you need reliable notification across a broad range of sources, or if you are monitoring multiple people, the time investment quickly exceeds the cost of automated monitoring.
For professionals with legal, financial, or compliance obligations, automated monitoring is not a luxury but a necessity. The cost of a missed deadline or inappropriate family contact far exceeds the modest monthly fee for comprehensive, reliable surveillance. ObituaryMonitor provides peace of mind that you will be notified promptly when it matters most.
How Matching Technology Differs Between Methods
The quality of obituary matching varies dramatically between monitoring methods. Manual searching relies entirely on human visual scanning of obituary listings, which becomes error-prone when dealing with common names like John Smith, Mary Johnson, or Robert Williams. The searcher must mentally filter results based on location, approximate age, and other contextual clues, a process that becomes increasingly difficult as fatigue sets in during repetitive daily checks.
Google Alerts uses basic keyword matching without any understanding of obituary context. An alert for John Smith might trigger on news articles about the actor, social media posts about unrelated individuals, or business announcements mentioning someone with that name. There is no way to specify location filtering within the alert configuration, no confidence scoring to prioritize likely matches, and no ability to cross-reference relatives or other identifying information that distinguishes one John Smith from another.
ObituaryMonitor uses purpose-built matching algorithms specifically designed for obituary content. When you add a name to monitor, you can specify the person's approximate age, city and state of residence, and known relatives. The matching engine then analyzes each obituary against these parameters, calculating a confidence score that reflects how closely the deceased person matches your search criteria. Only matches exceeding ninety percent confidence are flagged for notification, dramatically reducing the false positive rate compared to keyword-only approaches.
This confidence scoring is particularly important for common names. If you are monitoring for a John Smith in Dallas, Texas who is approximately seventy-five years old with a wife named Mary, an obituary for a different John Smith in Dallas who was forty-two years old with no spouse mentioned would receive a low confidence score and would not trigger a notification. This contextual matching capability is simply not available through manual searching or generic alert services.
Understanding Coverage Differences
Coverage breadth is perhaps the most significant differentiator between obituary monitoring methods. The obituary publishing landscape in the United States is remarkably fragmented, with notices appearing across thousands of different websites operated by funeral homes, newspapers, memorial platforms, and regional aggregators. No single source provides comprehensive national coverage, which means that relying on just a few sources will inevitably miss many obituaries.
Manual searching can realistically cover perhaps five to ten sources on a daily basis, representing less than one percent of the available obituary landscape. Even a diligent searcher focusing on the largest aggregators like Legacy.com and Echovita will miss obituaries that appear only on local funeral home websites or regional newspaper sites. This coverage gap grows even larger for deaths in rural areas where local funeral homes may not syndicate their obituaries to major aggregators.
Google Alerts theoretically has access to any content that Google indexes, but in practice its coverage of obituary sources is severely limited. Many funeral home websites are not crawled frequently by Google because they are small sites with limited external links. Local newspaper obituary sections may be behind paywalls or in formats that Google does not index effectively. The result is that a significant percentage of obituaries never appear in Google search results at all, let alone in a timely manner.
ObituaryMonitor maintains direct monitoring connections to over two thousand five hundred obituary sources, including major aggregators, regional newspapers, and individual funeral home websites. Our coverage extends to all fifty states, with particularly deep coverage in high-population areas where obituary volume is greatest. Each source is checked multiple times daily, ensuring that new obituaries are detected and processed within hours of publication rather than days or weeks later.
Timing and Reliability Considerations
For many use cases, the timing of obituary notification matters significantly. Probate attorneys have specific statutory deadlines for creditor notification that begin running from the date of death. Private investigators need current status information before deploying field resources. Family members want to know about deaths in time to attend memorial services or participate in estate matters. In each case, delayed notification reduces the value of the information and may create practical or legal complications.
Manual searching provides notification only when you perform the search, which for most people means once per day at most. Missing a few days due to vacation, illness, or simply forgetting can easily result in missing an obituary entirely, as some sources archive or remove older obituaries within a week of publication. The reliability of manual searching depends entirely on human discipline and consistency, which research shows degrades significantly over time for repetitive monitoring tasks.
Google Alerts typically sends at most one digest per day, and only when matching content is found and indexed. The indexing delay can add hours or days to the notification timeline, and the once-daily digest format means that even indexed content may not reach you until the following day. For urgent matters, this delay can be problematic, and there is no way to configure more frequent alerts or priority notifications.
ObituaryMonitor operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, continuously scanning sources and processing new obituaries as they appear. High-confidence matches trigger immediate notifications via both email and optional SMS text messages, ensuring you learn about relevant obituaries within hours rather than days. This continuous monitoring eliminates the reliability issues inherent in manual checking and provides consistent coverage even when you are unavailable to perform searches yourself.