How to track press coverage without Cision

You can track press coverage without Cision by setting up three kinds of AyeWatch monitor, a topic, a page and a social account, and sending each one to the channel where your team already works. It takes an afternoon, needs no sales call and starts at $9 a month. This tutorial is written for the developer who got handed the job.

What you are replacing

Cision's CisionOne is a PR platform: monitoring, analytics, reports, journalist outreach and social listening, with PR Newswire next to it for distribution. Pricing is by request through a form. If your company only used it to find out when it was mentioned, you are replacing the monitoring and nothing else.

Before you start

• An AyeWatch account. The Free Preview needs no card and allows three lifetime runs. Use it to test the rules.
• For anything real, a paid plan, from $9 a month. Paid plans add email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the REST API.
• A Slack channel or a webhook endpoint.

Step 1: write a coverage monitor

Create an Internet monitor and describe the coverage in plain English. Be specific about what to skip:

Articles, blog posts or forum threads that mention our company or product by name. Skip our own press releases, job listings and partner directory pages.

AyeWatch judges new items by meaning, not exact keywords, so you do not need to list every spelling. Each alert comes with a short summary and the sources.

Step 2: write an issues monitor

Make a second monitor for the stories you do not want to learn about late:

News, Reddit or regulator posts about outages, security incidents, data leaks or complaints involving our product.

Leave this one on Auto mode, which speeds checks up while the topic is busy and slows them when it goes quiet, or set a faster Custom interval. Because AyeWatch judges each item by meaning, a story about a competitor's outage will not trip this monitor, while a post about your own downtime will. Route it to the on-call channel so the right person reads it first, with the short summary attached.

Step 3: watch the pages you keep refreshing

Create a Webpage monitor and paste URLs such as:

• A competitor's newsroom or blog index
• A competitor's pricing page
• A regulator's notices page in your sector

AyeWatch alerts you when the content of the page changes in a meaningful way, with a summary of what changed.

Step 4: add social sources

Social monitors cover X searches and profiles, subreddits, YouTube channels, LinkedIn company posts, Instagram hashtags and TikTok profiles. Add a filter sentence to each, for example "posts that review or compare our CLI", and only matching posts come through.

Step 5: route each monitor

Channels are chosen per topic:

Step 6: wire up the webhook (optional)

If you want coverage in your own tools, point a webhook at your endpoint. Events are topic.update messages that include the AI summary, signed with HMAC-SHA256. Verify the signature, then store or forward the event. The REST API also lets you create, list, update and delete topics from code, which is handy if you keep monitor definitions in a repo.

Step 7: check the results against your old tool

Run both for a week or two. AyeWatch has no contracts or cancellation fees, so the cost of overlap is low. Compare what each surfaces for your coverage and issues monitors.

When this is not enough

Keep Cision if your team sends releases through PR Newswire, pitches from its database of more than 500,000 journalists and outlets, or needs TV, radio and print clips in its reports. AyeWatch does none of those. For web, page and social coverage piped into Slack or code, the setup above does the job, and the AyeWatch and Cision comparison summarizes the difference for anyone who asks why you switched.