Topic Alerts
Describe the subject in plain English. Stop babysitting a Boolean that goes stale every week.
Topic alerts watch a subject in plain English instead of a Boolean string you have to babysit.
Boolean feels professional. AND, OR, quotes, minus words. It also rots. A competitor ships under a new brand. A reporter uses a nickname. A filing uses a legal entity you forgot to include. You add operators. The query becomes a paragraph. You are now the monitoring system.
A topic is a sentence you would send a coworker. "New evidence that this merger got a second-request or a lawsuit." "Coverage that this model is delayed, cancelled, or quietly renamed." You can still be precise. You just stop pretending that tokens are the subject. Google Alerts is Boolean's friendly cousin: one box, one string, mail when the index sees it. Fine for casual keyword email. Wrong for a subject that keeps changing clothes.
Plain English, not Boolean
Write what should fire and what should not. The ignore line is the skill. "Ping me on primary news or filings about a data-center lease in this county. Ignore real-estate listings and job ads." Without the ignore line, a topic is just a vague keyword. With it, the model has a chance.
How that scoring works is in how LLM monitoring works. Why it beats strings is in semantic vs keyword alerts. If you are leaving Google Alerts, use the alternative guide or vs Google Alerts. If the problem is volume, information overload is the same habit with a different title.
Topics plus pages
A topic without a URL still searches the public web you pointed it at. A page without a topic still needs a rule or you will hear about every restyle. The useful setup is both. Topic for the subject. URL for the source that historically moves first. IR page. Gazette. Lab blog. Subreddit, if that is honestly where the beat breaks.
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics, Daily or slower, push and in-app. Three topics is the whole point of the word. Pro is $9 a month for 50. Paid channels are email, Slack, Discord, webhooks, and a REST API. Daily is enough to test whether the sentence is any good. Faster intervals are for subjects where a miss has a time cost.
Start a monitor in under a minute
Free Preview is six lifetime runs across three topics. No card.
Try AyeWatch freeWhen Boolean still wins
Keep a keyword or Boolean tool when the token is unique and the cost of a synonym miss is zero. Docket numbers. Exact product SKUs. A rare last name. Keep Google Alerts for those. AyeWatch will not be a better Westlaw. It will not be Distill's XPath. It will not be a screenshot overlay. It reads meaning on pages and topics you named. That is a worse fit for a token, and a better fit for a subject.
Start with the Boolean you rewrote most recently. Paste it into a sentence a human would say. Run one topic. If the summary matches the subject, delete the operators. If it does not, the sentence is still doing the token's job. Say the subject again, out loud, and write that.