Guide
How to set up tender alerts.
Checking portals by hand means you find tenders late or not at all. Alerts flip discovery from a daily chore into a push: define what you want once, and new matching contracts come to you. The trick is filtering tight enough to trust the feed.
Set up alerts in four steps.
1
Define your sectors
Start from what you sell, mapped to procurement sectors — IT, construction, professional services, medical, and so on. Scoping by sector cuts the bulk of irrelevant notices before any other filter.
2
Name your target buyers
Add the specific agencies and buyer types you want to serve. A contract from an agency you can't realistically deliver to is noise; excluding them keeps the alert feed something you actually read.
3
Tune the filter until you trust it
Too broad and you ignore the alerts; too narrow and you miss real opportunities. Run the filter against existing tenders first, check the matches are right, then save it. A trustworthy alert is one you act on every time it fires.
4
Choose a channel and cadence
Decide where alerts land — email, or programmatically over the API or MCP server for a workflow — and how fast. Real-time alerts catch a posting within minutes; a daily digest is fine for slower-moving sectors.
The reason most suppliers miss winnable tenders isn't access — it's timing. Notices have short response windows, and a tender found three days late is often a tender you can't bid on. An alert closes that gap by pushing the opportunity the moment it posts.
Alert quality is a filtering problem. A feed that fires on everything gets ignored within a week; a feed scoped to your sectors and buyers stays useful. Sell to State alerts run over the same 194-market dataset as the UI, so you can also pull them through the API or MCP server into an existing pipeline.
Frequently asked questions
What are tender alerts?
Tender alerts are saved searches that notify you when a new government contract matches your criteria — your sectors, target buyers, and keywords. Instead of checking portals daily, you define what you want once and new matching tenders are pushed to you.
How do I get notified about new government contracts?
Set up a saved alert scoped to your sectors and target buyers. With Sell to State you can receive matches by email, or pull them programmatically over the API or MCP server, within minutes of a posting rather than on a next-day digest.
How do I stop tender alerts from being noisy?
Scope them. Filter by sector first, then by the specific buyers you can serve, and test the filter against existing tenders before saving it. A tight alert you act on every time beats a broad one you learn to ignore.
Can an AI agent monitor tenders for me?
Yes. Sell to State exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so an AI assistant or your own app can run alert queries, pull award history, and monitor new opportunities through the same data the UI uses.
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