Radar Lite

• Checks how often your name has appeared in news coverage over the last 12 months and returns a mention count, a breakdown by language, a breakdown by country, and a list of your most recent sources.
• This is a media-mentions check, not a citation check — Citation Quick-Check and Citation Lens cover academic citations separately, from a different data source entirely.
• Feeds directly into the Published Material criterion and, more broadly, into establishing field-wide notice of your work.

The in-product screen title is "Merito Radar Lite" — this free check is a 12-month snapshot; the Pro upgrade (Radar Full) is ongoing monitoring, a genuinely separate feature covered below.

Radar sits in the Strengthen stage of the Case Journey — after Merito Score has told you which criteria need work, Radar tells you honestly how much media footprint you actually have to lean on for Published Material. Run it either to confirm real coverage you suspect exists, or to confirm you don't have much yet, before over-relying on this criterion in your strategy.

The tool's own results page points forward to Checklist Generator next, once you know your media footprint.

• Just your full name — no upload, no case, no account needed to run the search itself.
• Takes up to 40 seconds — it's actively checking recent coverage, not returning a cached result.
• Cost: free to search. No tool_costs row exists for Radar Lite — a free account (10 seconds) unlocks the full language/country breakdown after your search completes. A daily rate limit protects the search infrastructure; it is not a credit charge.

• Mentions found — your total news mention count over the trailing 12 months.
• By language — what share of your mentions appeared in coverage of each detected language, as percentage bars. Shows "Not enough coverage in the last 12 months to break this down" when there's too little data for a meaningful split.
• By country — the same breakdown, by country of the covering outlet.
• Most recent sources — the specific outlets your most recent mentions came from, shown as chips. Shows "No recent sources found" if there's nothing to list.

Warning: A low or zero mention count isn't itself bad news — it's an honest signal that Published Material isn't currently a criterion worth leaning on, which is exactly the kind of thing worth knowing before you build a strategy around an assumption.

• The free Lite check — your 12-month mention count, by language and country, plus your most recent sources — is available to anyone with a free account. No card, no plan required for this.
• The Pro tier is a genuinely separate feature set, not a bigger version of the same search: ongoing multilingual monitoring with instant alerts (so you learn about new coverage as it happens, not only when you manually check), plus one-click Wayback archiving of every mention so it's exhibit-ready. This lives behind the paid plan.
• If you start the 7-day Pro trial to reach that ongoing-monitoring tier, know that Stripe's checkout collects a card upfront (not a no-card trial) — but cancelling anytime afterward is self-serve through the billing portal. None of this is needed to run the free 12-month check itself.
• Start your free trial from /dashboard/billing when you're ready for ongoing monitoring — the one-time free search never requires it.

• Treating the 12-month window as your full media history. Radar Lite is explicitly scoped to the trailing 12 months; older coverage relevant to your case needs to be tracked separately.
• Assuming name variants are searched automatically. Nicknames, maiden names, and alternate transliterations aren't covered by a single search — check each one you're known under.
• Confusing this with the citation tools. Radar tracks news coverage of you; Citation Quick-Check and Citation Lens track academic citations of your work. Different data sources, different evidentiary questions.
• Ignoring real coverage you know about that doesn't appear. Either it falls outside the 12-month window, or it's a genuine gap worth knowing about — either way, worth investigating rather than dismissing.