Track your industry and competitors in ten minutes a week

The fastest way to track your industry and competitors is one weekly briefing with a section for each question you care about (competitors, customers, regulation, funding, research, chatter) plus a few alerts for events that can't wait until Monday. Avos builds both from sources you choose, reads them for you, and emails one edition you finish in about ten minutes.

Most competitor monitoring fails in one of two ways: a pile of keyword alerts that fire on every passing mention of a company name, or a dashboard someone set up once and nobody opens. What works is a format with an end: one edition a week that answers the same questions every time and leaves out what didn't change.

Why do keyword alerts miss what matters about competitors?

A keyword alert matches words, and competitors are mentioned far more often than they act. A search for a rival's name brings back their earnings, a listicle that names them, a job post and a reprint of last week's press release, all with the same urgency. The events you care about ("they cut prices", "they lost their CFO", "they raised a Series C") are hard to write as keywords without catching everything else. Avos News vs Google Alerts goes through that difference, including the cases where a keyword alert is still the right tool.

A briefing works at the level of the question instead. Each section has its own sources and a filter written in plain words, and AI reads each story to decide whether it answers that section's question.

What should a weekly industry briefing contain?

These six sections cover most industries. Keep the ones that fit and drop the rest.

If your competitors are listed, add a short Financial section with their shares, so you see where each one closed next to the news that moved it. Build a personal markets briefing covers the market side in more depth.

A few notes on the feeds, because they make or break each section:

• Funding rounds arrive with the amount, stage, investors and sources for each round. The feed takes one field, a sector or a name, so to keep only later rounds, say so in the section's filter.
• Research papers are searched in English, so write the topic in English even when the briefing is in another language.
• Company news by ticker works best for large listed companies. For a smaller one, add a news search with its name too. A US-listed company's SEC filings can be followed as RSS: ask the AI editor.
• Regulators often publish RSS. The feed directory includes official feeds such as the FDA, the Federal Reserve and the ECB.
• YouTube and podcasts give you the substance without watching or listening: a section summarizes what's said in each video, and podcast search returns the passages where your topic came up.

How do you set it up in Avos?

1. Start from a template or a sentence. The Tech, AI & Business template is a ready-made start, with top business stories, a market snapshot, tech news and AI releases. Or describe your industry to the AI editor: "A weekly briefing on the European heat pump market. Competitors: A, B and C. Customers: installers and housing associations."
2. Add one section per question. Name the sources and the editor adds the feeds: "Add the Funding rounds feed for climate tech", "Follow these three X accounts in the chatter section", "Add the RSS feed of B's newsroom".
3. Write the filters. One or two sentences per section, in plain words. They stay visible in each section's settings, so anyone on the team can read what the briefing is told to keep.
4. Pick a format per section. Headlines with descriptions suit competitors and funding. An article brief, which puts the bottom line up front, suits the one regulatory story that needs explaining. A professional tone keeps it readable for colleagues.
5. Schedule it weekly. Choose the weekday, the time and your timezone, for example Monday at 8:00. Set each section's timeframe to the last 7 days so the edition covers exactly one week.
6. Preview and share. Generate an issue now to see it. Then add colleagues' email addresses to the newsletter's audience so every issue reaches them too.

After that, tune it by message. "The competitor section is too long, keep the top five." "Drop anything about consumer products." Each issue ends with a 1 to 5 rating. The AI editor sees your recent ratings, suggests one change when they point at a problem, and changes nothing until you agree.

How does it stay at ten minutes a week?

Through what the briefing leaves out. The same story from several outlets arrives once. A section remembers what it ran in recent issues and won't repeat it, and a story that ran in one section isn't printed again in another. A section with nothing new that week is left out instead of being padded with older news, so a quiet week reads short.

It also arrives finished, as a designed newsletter in your inbox and on the web, not a list of links. The Tech, AI & Business template page shows its latest real issue.

Which events deserve an alert instead of the weekly briefing?

Some events can't wait a week. For those, Avos has alerts: they watch the sources you pick and email you when something new matches, as it happens, as a daily digest or as a weekly report.

News alerts check each new story against a condition you write in plain words and tell you why it matched. When several outlets run the same story, you get it once. The news monitoring page has recipes to start from (competitor watch, brand mentions, regulatory watch, hiring signals), and you can preview what an alert would have caught recently before you turn it on. Price alerts watch stocks, ETFs, crypto, forex, commodities and US economic indicators, and fire once or every time a level is crossed; price alerts has the details. Combined alerts mix news and price conditions and fire when all of them hold, or any one. Alerts run on a schedule set by your plan, not in real time; the pricing page shows how often each plan checks.

Keep alerts few. A good setup is the weekly briefing for context and two or three alerts for the events that would change what you do this week.

When is a dedicated competitive intelligence tool the better choice?

• You need to see items the minute they're published. Avos alerts check on a schedule and briefings arrive once per edition.
• You need to know when a web page changes. Avos reads new stories from feeds and searches. It doesn't watch a pricing page or a careers page for edits.
• You run a team intelligence function. Shared boards, annotations, analyst workflows and integrations with chat tools or a CRM belong to dedicated platforms. Feedly's Enterprise plan is one example, and our Avos and Feedly comparison covers where it is stronger.
• You must see every mention. A briefing selects. If every item on the beat matters, a feed reader you work through is the honest choice; Agentic briefing or feed reader? helps you decide.

For everyone else, one weekly edition tells you what changed in your market without costing a morning. If you already follow industry blogs over RSS, Turn your RSS feeds into a daily email briefing shows how to bring them in.

FAQ

Can Avos monitor a competitor's website?

It can follow anything the site publishes as RSS, such as a blog or a newsroom, and a news search or web search covers what's written about the company elsewhere. It doesn't detect changes to the text or design of a page.

Can I track private companies and startups?

Yes. News searches work for any company name, and the Funding rounds feed can follow a company or an investor by name. Company news by ticker and market data are for listed companies only.

How fast do Avos alerts arrive?

Alerts check on a schedule set by your plan and email you after the check that finds a match, either right away or bundled into a daily or weekly digest. The pricing page lists how often each plan checks. If you need to know within minutes, use a real-time tool.

Can my whole team get the briefing?

Yes. Add your colleagues' email addresses to the newsletter's audience and every issue goes to them as well; they can unsubscribe at any time. Your plan sets how many recipients a newsletter can have.

Does it work for markets outside the English-speaking world?

Yes. Sources can be in any language, a news search can have its own language and region, and the briefing is written in the language you pick, one of many Avos supports.