Recipes / Watch what is said about a named individual

Watch what is said about a named individual

/stories in hybrid mode. This page is the operational half — what comes back, how it breaks, and what running it for real takes.

The request

GET /stories
  ?q="<full name>" <disambiguating term>
  &mode=hybrid
  &from=<now - 7d>

As a call you can paste:

curl -s -G "https://api.unzoi.com/stories" \
  -H "x-api-key: $UNZOI_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "q="<full name>" <disambiguating term>" \
  --data-urlencode "mode=hybrid" \
  --data-urlencode "from=<now - 7d>"

For an agent rather than a script, the same query is the list_stories MCP tool with these as its arguments.

Parameters used here

• from
• mode
• q

What comes back

Story clusters mentioning the person. Expect a lower precision than a company query; personal-name ambiguity is not fully solvable without entity resolution.

Field by field: the /stories response reference.

How this goes wrong

Querying a common name with no disambiguation and concluding the coverage is enormous. Most of it is other people.

Adapting it

The same construction works for board members, regulators and named officials. For a person who has recently changed roles, run two queries — one with each disambiguating term — because coverage will use the old affiliation for months. Where transliteration is a factor, query the name in each script rather than relying on semantic bridging alone, which handles concepts better than it handles proper nouns.

Running it for real

Keep the disambiguating term in the query permanently, not just during setup: a name that is unambiguous today acquires collisions as other people become newsworthy, and the failure is silent. Store the story identifiers you have delivered rather than the article ones, since the same profile piece is frequently syndicated for weeks. Review the results by hand monthly — name collision is the failure mode here and it is invisible in any aggregate metric.

Related recipes

• Track what is being written about your competitors
• Track a brand across every language you don't read

Why this approach

The case for these parameters over the obvious alternatives — and when this recipe is the wrong tool entirely — is on the recipe's page on unzoi.com. It is kept there rather than repeated here, so the argument and the operations cannot drift apart.