Keyword Sentinels — Phrase Alerts on SEC Filings

Analyst+ feature · 6 min read

A Keyword Sentinel watches the SEC filing stream for a phrase you choose — "covenant waiver," "going concern," a supplier's name — and fires an alert within minutes of a filing that contains it hitting EDGAR. Structured Sentinels match on form types, items, and company universes. Keyword Sentinels match on the language inside the filing, so you can watch for things no form field captures.

What it does#

Every other Sentinel matches on metadata: a form type, an 8-K item code, a company in your universe. That works when you know the shape of what you're looking for. It doesn't help when the thing you care about is a phrase that could appear in any filing from any company — a legal term of art, a product name, the name of a company you have credit exposure to.

A Keyword Sentinel closes that gap. You give it a phrase; it scans the text of each qualifying filing as it arrives and fires when the phrase appears. The match runs against the live stream, not a nightly batch, so a hit reaches your Briefings inbox within minutes of the filing being published.

Who it's for#

Keyword Sentinels are built for watches that are market-wide by nature — where the phrase matters more than the filer:

• Credit and counterparty risk — watch a borrower's name or "covenant waiver," "forbearance agreement," "event of default" across every issuer's filings, not just companies you already track.
• Supply-chain and concentration exposure — watch a key customer or supplier's name to catch when any public company discloses a relationship, a loss, or a dispute involving them.
• Thematic and legal language — watch "going concern," "material weakness," "restatement," or a regulatory term to see it the moment it enters a filing anywhere in the market.

If you already know which companies you care about, a structured Sentinel scoped to your universe is the better tool. Reach for a Keyword Sentinel when you don't know the filer in advance — only the language.

How it works#

It scans the live stream. As each filing arrives on EDGAR, edgar.tools checks it against every active phrase and fires the ones that match. There is no polling delay on your side and no separate search to run.

It matches whole phrases, case-insensitively. "Covenant Waiver," "covenant waiver," and "COVENANT WAIVER" all match the same phrase. Matching is anchored to word boundaries, so "waiver" does not match inside "waivers'" — it looks for the phrase as written.

It reads the primary document, not the exhibits. The scan covers the first 250 KB of the filing's primary document. Exhibits — press releases, credit agreements, opinion letters attached as separate files — are not scanned in this version. Most disclosure language you want to catch lives in the primary document; deep-exhibit coverage is a known limitation, not a bug.

Which filings are scanned#

Keyword Sentinels watch an allowlist of narrative forms — the ones where disclosure language actually lives. This is a fixed list, not every filing type:

Three high-volume families are deliberately excluded because structured Sentinels already cover them better:

• Schedule 13D / 13G activist and ownership stakes — filed as structured data since the SEC's 2024 modernization; watch them with the ownership and activist-signal workflows instead.
• Forms 3 / 4 / 5 insider transactions — structured filings; use the insider-activity workflow.
• 424B2 prospectus supplements — over 180,000 a year, almost all routine shelf takedowns; scanning them would flood the lane with noise.

Optional company narrowing#

By default a Keyword Sentinel watches any company across the allowlisted forms. You can narrow it to a company universe — a curated peer set or a list of tickers you pick — if you only care about the phrase when a specific set of companies uses it. Narrowing is optional; the market-wide watch is the default and the common case.

Setting one up#

Keyword Sentinels are composed on the same Sentinel composer at /sentinels/new.

1. Open the composer and, in the WATCH region, choose the phrase watch card. On Analyst and above, the card shows a phrase input and a counter (for example, "3 / 30 phrases").
2. Add your phrases. Type each phrase as you'd expect it to appear in a filing — "covenant waiver," not "covenant OR waiver." Each phrase is its own watch; a Sentinel can carry several.
3. Check the preview. The Insights rail estimates how many filings each phrase would have matched over the last 30 days, so you can tell a useful watch from one that will fire constantly before you save. The preview counts whole documents and is an estimate — it searches full documents including exhibits, while the live matcher reads the primary document — so treat it as a guide, not a contract.
4. Optionally narrow the universe under WATCH if you want the phrase to fire only for a specific set of companies.
5. Pick delivery in the DELIVER region — your in-app Briefings inbox always, plus an HMAC-signed webhook if you've configured one.
6. Save. The Sentinel goes active immediately and starts matching new filings as they arrive.

Fire limits and the daily digest#

Each Keyword Sentinel account can watch up to 30 phrases and receive up to 20 instant fires per day. Instant fires are the ones that push to your inbox in real time.

When a busy filing day pushes you past 20 instant fires, matches are not dropped — they roll into a daily digest that collects the day's remaining hits into a single summary. You still see everything that matched; the cap only governs how many arrive as individual real-time alerts. This keeps a broad phrase ("material weakness" during 10-K season, say) from burying your inbox while guaranteeing you never miss a match.

Availability#

Available on Analyst and above. Keyword Sentinels are an Analyst-tier feature. On Free and Professional, the phrase card appears in the composer as a locked preview so you can see what it does — creating one requires Analyst.

Structured Sentinels that watch form types, items, and company universes remain available on Professional. Keyword Sentinels — matching on filing language across the whole market — are the Analyst tier's watch capability.

See Compare Plans for full tier details.

Related#

• Sentinels — structured watches on form types, 8-K items, and company universes
• Briefings — the inbox where every Keyword Sentinel match arrives
• Webhooks — Analyst-tier delivery to your own HMAC-signed endpoint
• Live Filing Stream — the real-time feed Keyword Sentinels scan
• Search — one-off full-text search across the filing corpus, the query behind the composer preview