Competitor monitoring without Meltwater, set up by a developer

Competitor monitoring without Meltwater is mostly a plumbing problem: you need the right sources watched, a filter that throws away noise, and a way to get the result into the tools your team already reads. This tutorial builds that setup with AyeWatch in about an afternoon, from a developer's point of view, and ends with a signed webhook you can wire into anything.

You do not need Meltwater's media database or reporting for this. If you do need those, skip to the last section.

What we are building

Four monitors for one competitor set, each routed differently:

1. Launches and pricing news from the web at large, to Slack.
2. Their pricing and changelog pages, watched directly, to Slack.
3. Their social accounts and relevant subreddits, to the daily digest.
4. Hiring signals from their careers page, to a webhook that writes to your own database.

Step 1: create an account and pick a plan

Start on the AyeWatch Free Preview to test a monitor or two. It gives three lifetime runs across up to three topics at daily or slower intervals, no card required. For this tutorial you need a paid plan, because Slack, webhooks and the API are paid features. Paid plans start at $9 a month, billed monthly with no contract.

On a paid plan, Auto mode checks more often while a topic is busy and slows down when it goes quiet, so you do not have to tune each schedule by hand.

Step 2: write the web monitor

Create an Internet monitor. The description is a sentence, not a Boolean query:

Product launches, pricing changes, funding rounds and leadership hires at Acme, Globex and Initech. Skip stock-price roundups and reposted press releases.

AyeWatch reads news sites, blogs, forums, government pages and academic publications, and its AI judges each new item against that sentence by meaning. When something matches, you get one alert with a short summary and its sources.

Set the speed to Auto. Auto checks more often while a topic is busy and backs off when it goes quiet. Route it to your competitors Slack channel.

Step 3: watch the pages directly

Create a Webpages monitor and paste the URLs: each competitor's pricing page and changelog. Add a rule such as:

Alert when plans, prices or limits change, or a new product is announced. Ignore layout and copy tweaks.

This catches a change on the page itself, before anyone writes about it. Route it to the same Slack channel.

Step 4: add social

Create social monitors for the platforms that matter: X profiles or searches, subreddits, YouTube channels, LinkedIn company posts, Instagram hashtags or TikTok profiles. Give each a filter in plain English, for example "posts announcing features or outages". Send these to the daily digest email, which collects the day's matches into one dated briefing, so social chatter does not flood Slack.

Step 5: wire a webhook

For the careers-page monitor, choose webhooks as the channel. AyeWatch sends a topic.update event with an AI-written summary to your endpoint, signed with HMAC-SHA256. In your handler:

1. Read the raw request body before parsing it.
2. Compute the HMAC-SHA256 of the body with your webhook secret.
3. Compare it to the signature header in constant time, and reject mismatches.
4. Store the summary and source links in your table.

Check the API documentation, linked from the footer of the AyeWatch site, for the exact header name and payload fields before you write the handler.

Step 6: manage it from code

The REST API on paid plans lets you create, list, update and delete monitors, so the competitor list can live in a config file in your repo. If you prefer working through an AI assistant, the MCP server on paid plans lets an agent create, change or pause monitors for you with your API key.

How this compares to the Meltwater way

When to use Meltwater instead

If competitor monitoring is one input to a PR program that pitches journalists, sends releases and reports share of voice to leadership, Meltwater bundles all of that. AyeWatch does not have a journalist database or reporting dashboards.