The searches. Google News, US edition, in English, Aug 4 to Nov 1, 2026: Oatly as Oatly; Califia Farms as Califia Farms; Planet Oat as Planet Oat; Alpro as Alpro; the category as oat milk, plant-based milk. The US edition also lists news from other countries; it counts for every brand alike. We picked the rivals: oat and plant milk brands Oatly meets on shelves in the US (Califia Farms, Planet Oat) and in Europe (Alpro). Alpro sells mostly in Europe, so a US-edition search finds less of its news. Chobani was tried first: its news is about dairy.
How we read it. One Google News search per brand and category phrase per week, a busy week asked again in halves (82 searches, up to 30 articles each), read through DataForSEO: the outlet, headline, snippet and age of every result. An article found twice is counted once. Google prints a date for older articles and an age ("3 weeks ago") for recent ones, so a recent article's day can be days off. A card marked around rests on ages like "1 month ago" and can be weeks off. Some searches for Oatly returned 30 articles, the most one search reads, even over a day or two, so their counts are at least these.
Stories and kinds. A model (Gemini) read every headline and snippet we found for each brand: about the brand, named in passing, or not about it (another company with the same name, a shop listing); then grouped the articles about it into stories, one piece of news each, and gave each story a kind. 101 articles a search returned were not about the brand searched and are left out. 46 results were social posts, shop pages or a brand's own site and are not counted. 32 stock-ticker articles are set aside (Oatly 32).
The outlets. Outlets are counted once each, by the name Google News gives. The outlets slide ranks outlets by articles about any of the four brands plus articles a model read as about the category, from the category searches.
What Google News can't show. It lists the coverage it finds, not all coverage: paywalled trade titles, podcasts, TV and newsletters are mostly missing, and a search reads up to 30 articles. These are stories we found, not every story there was. We keep headlines, snippets and links, never article text.