Competitor monitoring

Keeping tabs on competitors is one of those “I know I should do this but I never have time” tasks that scheduled agent tasks solve perfectly.

What to monitor

Good things to track:

• Pricing page changes — when did they raise/lower prices, add a plan, or remove a feature?
• Homepage copy updates — messaging shifts often predict strategy shifts
• Job postings — who they’re hiring tells you what they’re building
• Blog posts and changelog updates — product direction
• Social media activity — are they being active or quiet?
• Press mentions — who wrote about them this week?

Less valuable to track (skip these):

• Every page on their site — too much noise
• Every employee’s LinkedIn — intrusive and low signal
• Every tweet — you’ll drown in noise

Setting up a monitor

Describe what you want in plain English:

“Set up daily monitoring for three of my competitors: Acme Corp, RivalCo, and Competitor X. Every weekday at 8am, check these pages for changes:

• Their pricing pages
• Their homepage
• Their /careers page
• Their blog

Deliver a digest to me via email. Only include changes — don’t tell me ‘nothing changed.’ If nothing changed on any page, just say ‘No updates today.’”

Your agent will:

1. Create a cron job for the monitoring
2. Use its built-in browser to fetch each page on schedule
3. Diff the content against the previous fetch (your agent stores snapshots)
4. Generate a digest of what actually changed
5. Deliver via your preferred channel

What “changed” means

Your agent is smart about diffing. It ignores:

• Minor formatting tweaks
• Date stamps that update daily
• Rotating testimonials
• Session cookies, tracking params, analytics noise

It flags:

• New pricing numbers or plans
• New hero copy
• New product names or feature names
• New job postings (with title and summary)
• New blog posts (with summary and link)
• Major layout changes

Output format

A good daily digest looks like:

Competitor update — Apr 10

🔴 Acme Corp

• Pricing: Pro plan went from $49 → $59 (20% increase)
• New blog post: “Why we’re rebuilding from scratch” — hints at product direction

🟡 RivalCo

• Careers: Now hiring “Head of AI Research” (was not open yesterday). Their stack includes PyTorch, JAX.

⚪ Competitor X

• No changes today

Each entry can link to the changed page, the diff, or the full text.

Deep research vs surface monitoring

Simple monitoring diffs visible page content. Deep research goes further:

• Reads the entire blog archive and finds patterns
• Scrapes the docs site for feature mentions
• Checks LinkedIn for employee count changes
• Looks up press mentions via web search

Deep research is more expensive (more tool calls, more tokens) and slower. Use it for periodic (weekly/monthly) reviews rather than daily monitors. Example:

“Every Monday morning, do a deep analysis of what Acme Corp shipped last week. Check their blog, their changelog, their docs for new features, and their LinkedIn for hiring signals. Give me a 200-word summary.”

How to use the output

Competitor monitoring is only useful if you DO something with it. Common patterns:

• Review at your morning coffee — 2 minutes, scan the digest
• Quarterly strategy update — your agent compiles the monthly digests into a summary
• Act on hiring intel — if RivalCo is hiring someone suspicious, your agent can dig deeper on who they’re looking for
• Pricing reactions — if a competitor raises prices, your agent can draft a positioning response

Storing historical snapshots

Your agent keeps historical snapshots in its workspace. You can ask:

“Show me how Acme Corp’s pricing changed over the last 3 months.”

And your agent will compile a timeline from the snapshots it’s been storing.

Plan considerations

Competitor monitoring uses:

• Web search credits (Serper) for finding new pages
• Browser sessions for scraping content
• Token credits for analysis and summarization

Heavy monitoring (10+ competitors, multiple pages each, daily) can burn through Standard tier’s included credits. If you’re doing heavy monitoring, Pro tier is recommended.

Ethics

Your agent will NOT:

• Scrape behind logins you don’t own
• Violate robots.txt (skips disallowed pages)
• Hit competitor sites at high frequency (minimum 1 hour between checks)
• Pretend to be a real user (user agent is set honestly)
• Access private APIs or use stolen credentials

If you ask it to do something that crosses those lines, it’ll refuse and tell you why.

Start small

Don’t try to monitor 20 competitors on day 1. Pick your 2-3 most important ones, run the monitor for a week, see what you actually read, and scale up from there. Most users find that 3 competitors + pricing + careers pages is the sweet spot.