CI-101 · Module 2

Setting Up Monitoring

3 min read

Research without monitoring is a snapshot that goes stale the moment you finish it. Monitoring is what turns a one-time effort into an always-on awareness system. The good news: setting up basic monitoring takes 30 minutes and maintaining it takes 15 minutes a day. The bad news: most people skip this step entirely and wonder why they keep getting surprised.

  1. Google Alerts Set up alerts for each competitor's company name, key products, and leadership names. Use quotes for exact matches. Set delivery to daily digest so you get one email per day instead of a stream of interruptions.
  2. Social Listening Follow competitor company pages and key employees on LinkedIn. Set up keyword searches in LinkedIn for your industry terms. If your competitors are active on X/Twitter, create a private list to track their posts without algorithmic noise.
  3. News Aggregators Use Google News or a tool like Feedly to create a feed for your industry and key competitors. AI-powered news tools can summarize and categorize automatically. The goal is one place to scan, not ten tabs to check.
  4. AI-Powered Monitoring AI agents can monitor websites for changes, scan job boards for new postings, and flag news that matches your collection priorities. If you have access to an always-on AI agent, this is one of the highest-value automations you can set up.

Do This

  • Dedicate 15 minutes each morning to scanning your monitoring feeds
  • Keep a simple log of notable signals — date, source, what you observed
  • Review and prune your alerts monthly so they stay relevant

Avoid This

  • Set up 50 alerts and never read them
  • Check monitoring feeds only when you have a specific question
  • Treat monitoring as a project with a start and end date — it is ongoing