How to switch from Talkwalker to AyeWatch without losing a search

If you want to switch from Talkwalker, the hard part is not the data. It is the searches. Years of Boolean queries, exclusions and topic folders hold most of what your team knows about which mentions matter. This guide shows how to carry that knowledge into AyeWatch in an afternoon, one search at a time, without an export file.

Before you start, decide whether you are replacing Talkwalker or trimming it. If your weekly output is a share-of-voice deck, a benchmark against competitors or a logo-detection report for a sponsor, keep Lumen by Talkwalker for that. AyeWatch has no analytics dashboards and no image recognition. It tells you when something happened, with a short written summary. Many teams find that the alerting half of their Talkwalker setup is what they use every day, and that half moves cleanly.

Step 1: List the searches people actually open

Open Talkwalker and write down every topic or query that someone on the team checked in the last month. Ignore the ones that only feed a quarterly report. For each search, note three things:

• What it is about: the brand, a competitor, a product line, an issue.
• What usually counts as a real hit, and what is noise.
• Who needs to see a hit, and how fast.

Ten live searches is a common result, even for teams with fifty saved queries.

Step 2: Rewrite each query as a sentence

Talkwalker searches are Boolean, and the platform's team often helps build them during onboarding. AyeWatch reads a plain-English description instead, and its AI judges each new item by meaning. So the job is translation, not copying.

Take a typical crisis query: the brand name OR its product names, AND (recall OR outage OR lawsuit), NOT the company's own press account. In AyeWatch that becomes:

"Coverage or posts about [brand] or [product] that report a recall, an outage, a lawsuit or a safety complaint. Skip our own press releases and routine name-drops."

The exclusions you built with NOT become part of the same sentence. Because the monitor reads for meaning, a post that complains about a product without naming the exact keyword can still match, and a list article that mentions the brand in passing does not.

Step 3: Pick the right monitor type

AyeWatch has eight monitor types, and one Talkwalker topic may split across several:

• Internet for news, blogs, forums and other web sources.
• Webpages for specific URLs, such as a competitor's pricing page or a regulator's notices page. This is something Talkwalker does not focus on.
• X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok for social accounts, subreddits, channels, hashtags and searches, each with its own plain-English filter.

A competitor topic in Talkwalker might become an Internet monitor for coverage of the competitor, a Webpages monitor on its pricing and changelog pages, and a LinkedIn monitor on its company posts.

Step 4: Set speed and delivery

Choose Auto on a paid plan and AyeWatch checks a topic more often while it is busy and less often when it is quiet. Or set a Custom interval that suits the topic.

Then route each monitor. Every plan gets the in-app feed and push notifications on web, iOS and Android. Paid plans add email alerts, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord and HMAC-signed webhooks, chosen per topic. Send crisis monitors to a Slack channel and competitor monitors to the digest.

Step 5: Run both for two weeks

Keep Talkwalker running while the new monitors build up a history. Compare the two each morning. Where AyeWatch misses something, add a sentence to the rule. Where it alerts on noise, add a "skip" clause. Most rules settle within a few edits.

What it costs after the switch

AyeWatch's paid plans start at $9 a month, with no contract or cancellation fee. The Free Preview gives three lifetime runs across up to three topics with no card, enough to test your two most important searches.

A short checklist

• Live searches listed, report-only searches set aside.
• Each search rewritten as one sentence, with what to skip.
• Webpages added for the competitor pages you used to check by hand.
• Crisis topics on a fast interval and a Slack channel.
• Two weeks of side-by-side running before the renewal date.

When you are ready, start with the Free Preview and rebuild your busiest search first. AyeWatch also published a longer comparison of Talkwalker alternatives if you want to see the other options before you commit.