Saved search and job alerts are the Upwork feature that stores a set of job-feed filters under a name and notifies a freelancer or agency by email or in the app when a new job post matches it.
After running a search on the job feed, with keywords and filters such as category, budget, hourly range, experience level, client spend and payment verification, the search can be saved. It then appears as a tab on the Find Work page, and Upwork offers to send alerts when new job posts match, either as they arrive or in a digest, with the options and limits set by Upwork. Alerts are what let a freelancer reach a popular post in the first minutes, which is when most hires are decided.
The craft is in the query. Upwork's search supports exact phrases, exclusions and skill terms, and a saved search built from how clients actually write their posts, rather than from the freelancer's own job title, finds work that the best-matches ranking misses. Several narrow searches usually beat one broad one, because the alert then carries signal rather than noise.
Saved searches do not change the proposal process; replying still costs Connects and the client sees nothing of how the post was found. They also do not see invite-only or private posts. For an agency, the owner or business manager keeps the saved searches for the whole team and bids from them for members, which is how a small agency keeps watch over several skills at once.
How Upwork Insights uses it
This term describes Upwork's own rules or product rather than a figure the index measures; the pages that do carry live figures are the stats and rate pages.