Media monitoring for PR: a three-topic setup without an enterprise deal
Brand, competitors and category, each routed to where your team reads, set up in AyeWatch instead of waiting on a Meltwater or Cision quote.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team
3 min read
Media monitoring for PR comes down to three topics: your brand, your competitors and your category, each sent to the place your team already reads. You can run that setup in AyeWatch from $9 a month, with a free preview first, instead of waiting on an enterprise quote from Meltwater or Cision.
This guide is for in-house comms people at startups, small agencies and the developers who often end up wiring the tools together. It skips the dashboard tour and goes straight to a working setup.
What a PR team needs from monitoring
Strip away the extras and four needs remain:
- Hear about coverage soon enough to respond. A story heading in the wrong direction is easier to address on day one than day three.
- See what competitors are getting. Their coverage shows which angles journalists are buying.
- Know who writes about your space. Bylines on relevant stories become your pitch list.
- Measure lift after a launch. Coverage spikes after an announcement are the clearest sign it landed.
None of this requires sentiment charts or a media database, which is good news for your budget.
The three-topic setup
AyeWatch takes plain-English descriptions rather than keyword strings, and its AI checks each new article against what you wrote. That lets you be specific.
| Topic | Example description | Where to send it |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | "News, trade press and blog coverage that mentions our company, our product or our CEO" | Main comms Slack channel |
| Competitors | "Press coverage of Competitor A or Competitor B, especially launches, funding and leadership changes" | A competitive intel channel |
| Category | "Industry news about our product category and the trends shaping it" | Daily digest or the app feed |
Start with the brand topic. Add one competitor topic per major rival, rather than lumping them together, so you can mute one without losing the others. Keep the category topic broad and read it as a digest.
Routing so people actually read it
The weakest part of most monitoring is the last step: alerts land in a tool nobody opens. On AyeWatch, push notifications and the feed come with every plan, and paid plans add email, Slack, Discord and webhooks. You pick the channel for each topic. Every update has a short summary and links to its sources, so a teammate can judge it from the message alone.
If a topic gets noisy, tighten the description, pause it, or mute it. That is faster than rebuilding keyword rules.
What about free tools?
Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts are free and worth knowing. Both email you when a phrase appears in new pages. They match words rather than meaning, so a brand that shares a name with something common will get noisy, and stories that discuss you without the exact phrase can slip past. For a solo founder with an unusual company name, they may be enough to start.
And the enterprise platforms?
Meltwater uses tailored pricing and offers a guided demo instead of a self-serve trial. Cision asks you to request pricing. If you run PR for a large brand and need media databases, distribution and reporting under one contract, those suites are built for it. For a team that mainly needs to know when it is in the news, they are more than the job requires.
Your first week
- Sign up for AyeWatch's free preview and write the brand topic.
- Add your two biggest competitors as separate topics.
- Connect Slack once you move to a paid plan, and route brand coverage there.
- Review the feed on Friday and refine any description that let through the wrong stories.
- Start a simple coverage log with the outlet, the writer and the angle of each story, so the next pitch list builds itself from what you have already seen.
By the end of the week you will have a monitoring setup that costs a fraction of an enterprise contract and fits the way your team already works.