Aira watches every company in your markets for a fixed list of standard signals. A custom signal is the one you care about that is not on that list: you describe the event in your own words, and Aira looks for it in the news. Any member of your organisation can create one, and everyone sees the hits.
What a custom signal is
Standard signals are a fixed list that Aira checks every company against. Some come from official filings, such as new annual accounts or a change of registered address. Others come from the news, such as layoffs or a contract won.
A custom signal covers everything else. You write a sentence or two describing the event you want to hear about, and Aira finds it in the news about companies in your markets. The page offers examples to start from:
Companies launching a sustainability or net-zero program
Companies hit by a cyberattack or data breach
Companies moving their head office
Custom signals come with every active Aira membership. No plan tier, no add-on.
Create a signal
Open Intel and follow the Custom signals link, or go straight to ai.aira.app/app/signals.
Pick your markets. This defaults to your organisation's markets.
Describe the event in your own words.
Run the first preview. It takes about 30 seconds.
Answer Aira's clarifying questions. Each option spells out what it leaves out, and the preview updates as you answer.
Keep or change the name and badge colour Aira suggests. On colour: "Green and red tell your team the news is good or bad for the company. Grey claims neither."
Save.
What the preview is telling you
The preview answers one question: does this wording catch roughly the right kind of thing? It is a sample, not a forecast, and the page says so: "I judged a sample of the last 7 days and found 2 matches in it."
A saved signal judges far more news than the preview does. A preview that found one match and a saved signal that found twenty over the same week are both correct; the saved one looked harder. Read the preview for the kind of story it returns, not the count.
The wording locks when you save, so this loop is where you settle it. To reword a saved signal, use New signal from this one, which copies the description into a fresh draft: "Copied from the saved signal. Change it, then preview what the new wording catches." You get a second signal alongside the first, with its own 90-day look-back, and the original keeps the hits it already found.
After you save
Aira looks back over the last 90 days, showing progress as it goes: "Loading 90 days of history, 12 done". This is where the real number of matches appears. After that, the signal keeps watching for new ones.
Every hit reaches you in three places:
On the news item itself, wherever you read it in Aira
As a filter in company search and in your saved views
In your CRM, if you turn that on
Send hits to your CRM
Custom signal hits can flow to HubSpot and Salesforce, signal by signal and separately for each connection: in Settings, open Integrations, choose your CRM, then Signals. Your own signals sit under a Your signals category alongside the standard ones.
Aira's part ends at delivery: "Choose what flows to CRM. Your workflows decide what happens when a signal lands." For the full picture, see Choose which signals Aira syncs to HubSpot and Choose which signals Aira syncs to Salesforce.
What a custom signal reads
A custom signal reads the news, and it fires on an article that names a company Aira can identify. Two things follow.
Standard signals also draw on filings and financials. A custom signal does not. If the event you want only ever shows up in a filing, no wording will catch it.
An article has to name a company. A market-wide piece about an industry trend produces nothing, though the same story does produce hits for whichever companies it names.