How CueBot works

1. Describe it in a sentence

Write it the way you would ask a well-read friend: “Tell me when the 2026 F1 drivers’ championship is decided”, or “Alert me if the EU adopts new rules on AI in medical devices”. No keywords, no search operators.

2. Answer a question or two

If the sentence leaves something open — which market, which kind of announcement — CueBot asks. Usually one or two questions, each with suggested answers you can tap. Skip any you do not care about.

3. CueBot builds the watch

It works out what the event looks like in the news:

• the named things involved — companies, people, institutions;
• words an article must mention, and words that make it more likely to be the real thing;
• what it is never about, so near-misses are left out;
• the news sources worth following. Every source is fetched and checked before it is used; one that is unreachable or is not actually news is dropped rather than silently kept.

If it still has to guess at something, it says so plainly on the review screen, as an assumption you can change.

4. You review it — nothing runs until you say so

Before anything is watched, you see the whole plan and can change any of it:

• edit the terms and exclusions;
• remove sources, or add any feed or news page by its address;
• see what it would have caught last week, so you know whether it is too broad, too narrow, or simply waiting on a quiet topic;
• preview the exact email you would get.

Then press Start watching.

5. It checks on a schedule

Every hour on the Free plan, every 30 minutes on Starter and every 15 minutes on Pro. Each check is two steps:

1. A fast filter over the new articles from your sources, looking for your terms and leaving out your exclusions. Most checks end here, having found nothing.
2. A careful read of anything that got through. An AI model reads each candidate against your description and decides whether this is the event itself or just an article that mentions it — and writes down why.

A sensitivity setting per watch — broad, balanced or strict — decides how sure it has to be before it tells you. Your watch list shows a heartbeat of recent checks, so a quiet watch is visibly working, not broken.

6. You get an alert when it happens

An alert gives you the headline, the source, when it was published and a short explanation of why it matched. It arrives by email on every plan; Pro adds Telegram, WhatsApp and webhooks — here is how to set them up.

For each watch you choose what happens after a match: keep reporting follow-up news, or pause after the first one — useful for one-off events like a release date or a verdict. Every alert asks was this useful? — one tap, and the answers are what matching is tuned against.

What CueBot does not do

• It is not instant. It checks every 15 to 60 minutes depending on your plan, so it suits things that matter within the hour, not the second.
• It reads the news, not social media. Posts on X, Reddit and the like are not sources.
• It cannot read behind paywalls. It works from what a source publishes openly.
• It is not advice. An alert tells you something was reported; see the disclaimer.

More in the FAQ, or see the kinds of things people watch in use cases.