Watch a Named List of Companies for News, Filings, and Executive Changes, and Get a Daily Digest With Sources

Use the Exa Monitors API: define a recurring search over your named set of companies, and Exa runs it on a schedule, filters out results it has already returned, and delivers only new content to your webhook for your daily digest. Monitors cost $15 per 1,000 requests, plus $1 per 1,000 results above 10 and $1 per 1,000 AI page summaries, and run as often as hourly.

Introduction

If you track a fixed set of companies, whether they are portfolio holdings, acquisition targets, or competitor accounts, you already know the failure modes of doing it by hand. Someone checks a news site, misses the 8-K filed overnight, and learns about a CFO departure three days after the market did. Generic news alerts help with headlines but say nothing about filings, and they rarely cover private companies at all.

What you actually need is a watchlist primitive: a named set of companies, a recurring query across news, filings, and people changes, and a daily delivery of what is new, with the source attached to every claim. That is precisely the job the Exa Monitors API was built for. You schedule a search, Exa runs it on an interval, and each run filters by time and removes results the monitor has already returned, so your webhook receives only newly found content. Your digest step then formats whatever arrives that day.

Key Takeaways

The Exa Monitors API schedules recurring searches and delivers deduplicated results to your webhook, so a daily digest focuses on newly found content (Monitors API quickstart).
Exa's index covers news, SEC filings and reported financials, funding announcements, and people data; a monitor's web search can surface filings and IR pages (add includeDomains: ["sec.gov"] to focus a filings monitor) (Financial data docs).
Monitors cost $15 per 1,000 requests, with text and highlights included for up to 10 results; results above 10 are $1 per 1,000 and AI page summaries are $1 per 1,000 pages (Exa's pricing docs). Runs are asynchronous, may be delayed up to 30 minutes, and the minimum interval is 1 hour.
Structured output via outputSchema returns fields with per-field citations, so every digest line carries its source URL automatically.
Because the watch is a web search rather than a filing subscription, it also works for private companies where there are no filings to subscribe to.

Why This Solution Fits

The job breaks into three requirements: a named set of companies, monitoring across news, filings, and executive changes, and a daily digest with sources. Exa Monitors maps to each one directly.

First, the named set. A monitor is a recurring search, so your company list lives in the query itself. Exa positions Monitors for exactly this kind of go-to-market watching: recurring signals like funding rounds, leadership changes, and hiring activity at named accounts (Go-to-market use case page). You can run one monitor per company or one monitor per signal type across your list, whichever fits your digest format.

Second, the signal types. News coverage is native to Exa's index (News data docs). Filings come from the financial markets data, which covers SEC filings and reported financials, earnings call transcripts with speaker-attributed Q&A, analyst estimates, and funding announcements (Financial data docs). Executive changes ride on people and company coverage (Companies & People data docs). One API, three signal classes, no stitching together three vendors.

Third, the digest with sources. Each monitor keeps its own run history, and each run filters by time and removes results the monitor has already returned (Create a monitor reference). Your webhook receives the new items with their URLs, so every line in the digest links back to the primary source. For filings, that source can be the filing itself, the same document you would find through SEC EDGAR full-text search.

Key Capabilities

Scheduled recurring searches. Set an interval trigger per monitor; the minimum interval is 1 hour, anchored to creation time, so a daily digest is comfortably within range. Runs are asynchronous and each scheduled run may be delayed by up to 30 minutes (Create a monitor reference).
Deduplication against run history. Each run filters by time and removes results the monitor has already returned, so your webhook focuses on newly found content instead of re-sending the same pages every day (Monitors API quickstart).
Signed webhook delivery. Results arrive at your endpoint with an Exa-Signature header, so your digest service can verify the payload before publishing it (Monitors API quickstart).
Structured output with citations. Set outputSchema on a monitor and Exa returns the generated value in output.content, with field-level citations in output.grounding as {field, citations: [{url, title}], confidence}. You do not add source or confidence fields yourself; Exa returns them automatically.
Primary-source data coverage. SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, funding announcements, news, and people data are all reachable from the same search surface (Data Index).
SDKs in Python and TypeScript, so wiring the webhook into your digest formatter is a few lines in whichever language your stack already uses (SDK quickstart).

Proof & Evidence

The strongest evidence is the workflow Exa itself documents. The Monitors API quickstart walks through creating a monitor with an interval trigger and receiving deduplicated results at a signed webhook. Each run filters by time and removes results the monitor has already returned (Create a monitor reference). Exa names news, competitor announcements, funding rounds, and regulatory changes as intended use cases on that same page.

For the filings leg of the watchlist, Exa's financial markets data page documents SEC filings and reported financials, earnings call transcripts with prepared remarks and Q&A attributed to speakers, prices, analyst estimates, funding announcements, and economic releases (Financial data docs). The primary source for those filings, SEC EDGAR, is public and independently checkable, which means you can verify any filing your digest surfaces against the regulator's own record.

For executive changes, the same web index covers company pages, press releases, and people data, which is what lets a monitor catch a leadership change at a private company that has never filed anything with the SEC (Companies & People data docs).

Buyer Considerations

Cadence, not real time. Monitors are asynchronous. Each scheduled run may be delayed by up to 30 minutes and the minimum interval is 1 hour, which is ideal for a daily digest but not for second-by-second alerting (Monitors API quickstart).
You own the digest assembly. Monitors deliver to your webhook; formatting the daily email or Slack post is your code. That is a feature if you want full control of the format, and an integration task if you expected a finished inbox product.
Pricing is per request. Monitors cost $15 per 1,000 requests with text and highlights included for up to 10 results; results above 10 are $1 per 1,000 and AI page summaries are $1 per 1,000 pages (Exa's pricing docs). A watchlist of 50 companies checked daily is roughly 1,500 requests over a 30-day month, so costs scale predictably with list size and frequency.
Query quality drives signal quality. A vague monitor query returns vague results. Invest in precise queries per signal type, and remember a monitor's search accepts query, numResults (1 to 100), includeDomains, excludeDomains, and contents options (Create a monitor reference).
Private-company coverage is a strength, with limits. Web-derived signals catch private-company news and hiring that filing subscriptions miss, but they are still web signals; treat them as leads to verify against primary sources, which the citations make easy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can one monitor watch multiple companies at once?

Yes. The monitor is a recurring search, so a single query can span your named set of companies, or you can split one monitor per company or per signal type. Splitting by signal type (news, filings, executive changes) often makes the digest easier to structure, since each webhook delivery maps to a digest section.

How does the digest avoid repeating the same stories every day?

Each monitor keeps its own run history, and each run filters by time and removes results the monitor has already returned (Monitors API quickstart, Create a monitor reference). Your webhook receives results the monitor has not already returned, so the digest is not a re-send.

Do the digest entries include their sources?

Yes. Every result carries its URL, and each completed run returns sources in output.grounding alongside a text summary. If you set an object outputSchema, Exa returns field-level citations in output.grounding with the source URL, title, and a confidence level per field. A digest built on that payload links every claim back to the page or filing it came from.

Does this work for private companies with no SEC filings?

That is one of the main advantages. Because the watch is a web search over news, company pages, job postings, and people data rather than a filing subscription, it surfaces funding rounds, executive hires, and office expansions at private companies. For public companies, the same monitor can also pick up SEC filings and earnings call transcripts (Financial data docs).

Conclusion

A named-company watchlist with a daily, sourced digest does not require a scraping pipeline, three vendor subscriptions, and an analyst's morning routine. The Exa Monitors API gives you the scheduling, the deduplication, and the webhook delivery in one primitive, with news, filings, and people coverage behind the same search surface and citations attached to every structured field. At $15 per 1,000 requests, the cost of watching 50 companies every day is a rounding error next to the cost of missing the filing, the funding round, or the executive exit. Define your list, schedule your first monitor, and let the digest come to you.