Alerts, alert rules and the inbox

An alert is a change that passed one of your rules. TrendGap checks your rules when new measurements arrive and puts every alert in your inbox. On Free you can read the rules, and you get a weekly summary of your watches instead of alerts.

How rules work

Each rule compares a new measurement with an earlier one. Every watch starts with ready-made rules for its type, and they are all on until you switch one off. For example:

• Niche: complaints rising sharply in a week, or a new app entering the top results for the niche's keyword.
• App: a jump in 1-2 star reviews soon after an update, or a rating drop within a week.
• Keyword and trend: monthly searches rising month on month.
• Ranking: your Google position moving up or down by a few places in a week.
• AI brand: your brand named in fewer, or more, AI answers.
• Domain: estimated traffic rising sharply month on month.

Small numbers don't fire: each rule has a floor, so a tiny change is not treated as news, and the rule dialog states it. A rule without fresh data stays quiet, a value is never guessed, and a change that was already reported does not fire again.

Change a watch's rules

1. On your watchlist, open the watch's three-dot menu and choose "Alert rules…".
2. Under "Rules", switch off any rule you don't need on this watch. Each rule shows "Preset" or "Your rule" and when it last fired.
3. To add your own, go to "Add custom rule": pick the metric, how it should change, a value within the range shown and the window, then click "Add rule".
4. Check "Last 12 weeks with these rules": how many alerts the rules you left on would have sent, based on the stored measurements.
5. Click "Done".

Custom rules come with a paid plan. The "Mute this watch for 2 weeks" button at the bottom of the dialog silences the whole watch for a while.

Where alerts go

• Your inbox: always on.
• Email: one batched message per check while "Alert emails" is on in Settings. See Email preferences.
• Webhooks: on Pro and above, alerts also go to Slack, Discord or any HTTPS address you add in Settings. See Webhooks.

Work through the inbox

Open "Inbox" under "Stay updated" in the menu (the page heading currently reads "Alerts"). The menu shows how many items you haven't read, and the inbox button in the top bar shows a dot while something is unread.

1. Use the type buttons at the top to pick "All types", "Alerts", "Summaries", "Billing" or "Notices". The "Unread" chip hides what you have read.
2. Choose an item to read it in full. Items are grouped by the day of the check.
3. Click "Open" to go to the page it is about, "Mute this rule" to switch that rule off on that watch, or "Mark read".
4. "Mark all read" clears everything at once, and "Show older" loads earlier items.

What else lands in the inbox

• "Summaries": the weekly watch summary on Free, new posts found by your keyword monitors, new matches for your saved searches, and weekly recaps from other parts of TrendGap you use.
• "Billing": a notice about a month before a yearly plan renews, with the date and the price before any discount. It links to the "Plan and billing" tab in Settings and also comes by email. A plan that is set to cancel or pause gets no notice.
• "Notices": messages such as a longer tool run finishing, with the credits it used, and on a new paid plan a short recap of your first month with your real counts.

Too many alerts?

Mute a watch for 30 days with the bell on its watchlist row, switch off one rule in "Alert rules…", or click "Mute this rule" straight from an alert in the inbox.