Discover best practices

Prefer more feeds over a crowded one

When someone asks how many URLs can sit in a single feed, the useful answer is: when in doubt, create another feed.

A feed that watches five unrelated listing pages is hard to instruct and hard to debug. Split sources that:

• Publish on different schedules
• Need different click-through or download steps
• Have different relevance criteria

Then put them in a feed group. The parent monitors the child feeds and acts on the signals you specify. There is no downside to creating more feeds.

Write instructions like an assignment

Treat Instructions as a note to a reporter, not a search query. Name the page, the steps, and the standard.

Good keyword-feed instructions:

Monitor for breaking news about artificial intelligence regulation and policy changes.
Focus on government announcements, regulatory updates, and policy proposals from
official sources. Prioritize content from the last 24 hours that includes specific
policy details or legislative actions.

Good URL-feed instructions for a simple listing:

Monitor this research publication site for new peer-reviewed studies on food additives
published in the last 24 hours. Focus on studies that examine health effects, safety
assessments, or regulatory compliance. Exclude opinion pieces, editorials, or studies
focused solely on manufacturing processes.

For multi-step watches, write the clicks. See the government-database example on Feed settings.

Avoid instructions like “Monitor AI news,” “Find everything about technology,” or “Check for updates.”

Expect trial and error on multi-step feeds

If the Agent has to click a new row, open a landing page, download a PDF, and then decide whether it meets criteria, the first version of the instructions may not land exactly.

Run the feed manually. Read what it fetched and what it skipped. Add the missing step — which column to read, which link to click, which file to download — and run it again. Systematic instructions plus a couple of test runs is how those feeds get reliable.

Choose keywords in layers

1. Start with the core beat term.
2. Add synonyms or official language the source is likely to use.
3. Use include keywords to pin a subtopic.
4. Use exclude keywords to drop a common false match.

“Quantum computing breakthroughs” will usually beat “computing.”

Use include and exclude with intent

• Include: monitoring AI + include healthcare keeps the feed on health AI.
• Exclude: monitoring AI + exclude gaming drops video game coverage.

Do not stack so many filters that the feed can never match.

Keep email instructions actionable

Ask for a summary, a standard, and the fields you need.

Please email me a summary of new research reports published in the last 24 hours
only if the research pertains to food additives and includes safety assessments
or health impact studies. Include the study title, key findings, and a link
to the full paper.

Use templates selectively

• Enable only the templates that match the feed.
• Say when not to draft.
• Add a description on each selected template.
• Review the first drafts and tighten the instructions.

Match the schedule to the source

• Breaking news: daily or a custom schedule with more than one run
• Research publications: weekly or monthly is often enough
• Time-zone sensitive sources: set the timezone to when the source actually publishes

Run a feed manually first. Turn on a schedule after the results look right.