Based at New Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters in central London, it has overseas bureaux in Cairo, Delhi, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kyiv, Miami, Nairobi, Ramallah, Tashkent and Tbilisi.

[1] BBC Monitoring selects and translates information from radio, television, the press, news agencies and online outlets from 150 countries in up to 100 languages.

Reporting produced by the service is used by the government of the United Kingdom and commercial customers such as Oxford Analytica, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Liverpool John Moores University.

The organisation played an important role in helping observers keep track of developments during the Cold War, the disintegration of the Iron Curtain and collapse of the Soviet Union.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs and Defence Committees strongly condemned the gradual scaling down of BBC Monitoring's capabilities in two separate reports published in late 2016.