An AI Distill alternative: rules in English instead of CSS paths

Page monitoring has worked the same way for years: tell the software where on the page to look, and it tells you when the characters there change. Distill is a well-made version of that idea. An AI Distill alternative works from the other end. You tell it what kind of change you care about, in a sentence, and AI that reads for meaning decides whether a new version of the page contains it. AyeWatch is built on that approach, and the difference says a lot about where monitoring tools are heading.

How selector monitoring decides

In Distill you open a page, select an element, and optionally add a condition such as "less than 200" or "contains In stock". On each check the tool fetches the page, finds the element by its path, and compares the text with the last version.

That model is precise and cheap. It is also literal. The tool has no idea what the element means. If the site moves the price into a new container, the path points at nothing. If a rotating banner sits inside the selection, every rotation looks like a change. The user's intent ("tell me if this gets cheaper") lives only in the user's head; the software sees coordinates.

How a rule-based AI monitor decides

AyeWatch skips the selection step. You paste one or more URLs and write the intent directly:

"Alert me when this is back in stock or the price drops below $200. Ignore changes to the review count."

On each check, AyeWatch reads the new version of the page against that rule. The company describes this in its structured data as "semantic AI alerts (not keyword matching)". If the page changed in a way the rule covers, you get an alert with a short written summary of what happened. If only the reviews or the layout moved, you hear nothing.

Three practical consequences follow:

• Layout changes stop breaking monitors. The rule names a fact about the page, not its position.
• Noise is filtered by instruction. "Ignore the review count" replaces narrowing the selection by hand.
• Several pages can share one rule. A competitor's pricing, changelog and careers pages can sit in one monitor with one sentence covering all three.

Beyond a single page

Once the monitor understands a rule, it does not need to be tied to a URL at all. AyeWatch also follows topics across more than a billion web sources and on X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, with the same kind of plain-English filter. A product page and the discussion about that product can feed one alert stream.

It also exposes this to other AI systems. Paid plans include a REST API with signed webhooks, and an MCP server at https://ayewatch.ai/api/mcp, so an assistant can be asked to "watch the release notes at this URL and tell me when a new version ships" and set the monitor up itself.

What it costs

Prices from both vendors' sites, checked October 2026.

Where the old model still wins

The AI approach trades some precision for understanding. If you need to know the instant one number on one page crosses a threshold, Distill's element conditions are exact, and its local checks can run every 5 seconds without counting against any quota. AyeWatch does not do element-level selection. Distill's free plan is also larger than AyeWatch's three-run preview.

Why this matters

The shift from "where to look" to "what to look for" mirrors what language models have done elsewhere: moving the user's intent into the input instead of encoding it in configuration. For page monitoring, that means fewer broken monitors and fewer irrelevant alerts. For anyone who left Distill because selectors kept breaking, a rule in plain English is the more natural fit. AyeWatch's comparison of Distill alternatives covers six other tools if you want to weigh the options.