How to switch from NewsWhip to AyeWatch, beat by beat

If you have decided to switch from NewsWhip, the move is shorter than most teams expect. There is no file to export and no data to map. You rewrite each beat you followed in Spike as a sentence, add the few pages you used to refresh by hand, and pick where the alerts land. This guide walks through it in the order that saves the most time.

One honest note first. AyeWatch does not predict which stories will go viral, and it has no engagement history. If your desk lives on predicted interaction scores, keep NewsWhip for that and use AyeWatch for everything else.

Step 1: List what you actually watched

Open Spike and write down every saved panel, search and alert your team checked in the last month. Next to each one, note why you watched it. You will usually find three kinds:

• Beats: a client, a product category, a policy area, a rival.
• Sources: a regulator's notices page, a company newsroom, a court docket, a specific subreddit.
• Spikes: panels you opened only to see what was taking off.

The first two move straight across. The third is the part AyeWatch does not do, and it is worth asking whether your team still needs it.

Step 2: Turn each beat into one plain-English monitor

NewsWhip searches are built from keywords and filters. AyeWatch reads new items and judges whether they match what you described, so you write the intent instead of the syntax.

A beat that used a long keyword string might become:

• Monitor: "Product launches, price changes and outages at the three largest meal-kit companies in the US"
• Rule: "Alert on confirmed announcements and credible reports. Skip discount codes, recipe posts and reviews older than a week."

One description often replaces several keyword panels, because spellings and synonyms no longer need their own lines. Each alert arrives with a short summary and its sources.

Step 3: Add page monitors for the quiet sources

This is where the switch tends to pay off. Many stories that matter never trend: a recall notice, a filing, an edit to a pricing page. NewsWhip is built around engagement, so a page nobody shares can slip past it.

In AyeWatch, paste the URL of each page you used to check by hand. You will get an alert when its content changes in a way that matters, not on every small edit. Good candidates are regulator notice pages, competitor pricing pages, job boards and policy pages.

Step 4: Rebuild your social watches

AyeWatch watches X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. You can point it at specific accounts and communities, such as subreddits, Reddit users, YouTube channels, LinkedIn company pages or TikTok profiles, and add a filter in plain English so only matching posts reach you. Facebook is not on that list, so if Facebook engagement was your main reason for Spike, weigh that.

Step 5: Choose a plan and the channels

You can do steps 1 to 4 on the free preview, which gives you three runs and needs no card. When the monitors earn their place, paid plans start at $9 a month on the pricing page.

For delivery, the feed and push notifications on iOS and Android come with every plan. Paid plans add email, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord, signed webhooks and the REST API. Route each monitor on its own: crisis beats to a Slack channel, slow research topics to the digest.

Step 6: Run both for two weeks

AyeWatch has no contract or cancellation fee, so there is little risk in overlap. For two weeks, compare what each tool caught. Look for stories AyeWatch found that never trended, and spikes NewsWhip flagged that your team acted on. That list tells you whether you still need the NewsWhip contract at renewal.

What you give up

Be clear with your team about the trade:

• No predicted engagement scores or viral rankings.
• No years of engagement history for long-range reports.
• No Facebook engagement data.

What you gain is self-serve signup, published prices, alerts on quiet sources, and summaries you can read on a phone. The full comparison has the side-by-side table. When you are ready, start with the free preview and move your busiest beat first.