Six months ago I was spending three hours every week on competitive monitoring.
Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. My competitors were shipping fast, posting on LinkedIn, updating their pricing pages, publishing blog posts that ranked for terms I was targeting. If I wasn’t watching, I was behind.
My process was manual: a spreadsheet of competitor URLs, a weekly calendar block to check them, a Notion doc where I copy-pasted screenshots and notes. It worked well enough, but it was expensive — three hours of my week, every week, on something that I knew could be automated.
Now it takes me zero hours. An agent runs every Sunday night, researches my competitors across every signal that matters to me, and drops a structured briefing in my Slack at 7am Monday. By the time I’m making coffee, I already know what changed last week.
Here’s the exact setup.
What I’m monitoring and why
Before building anything, I listed every signal I actually care about:
Product changes:
- New features mentioned on product pages or changelogs
- Pricing page changes (the most important — always signal a strategic shift)
- Job listings that reveal roadmap priorities (hiring a “Head of Enterprise Sales” means they’re going upmarket)
Content and SEO:
- New blog posts targeting keywords I care about
- Landing pages that didn’t exist last week
- Changes to their homepage positioning or messaging
Company signals:
- LinkedIn posts from founders or leadership
- Press releases or news coverage
- G2/Capterra/Product Hunt reviews (new ones reveal customer sentiment)
- New case studies or customer logos
Distribution:
- New integrations or partnership announcements
- Product Hunt launches
- Major Hacker News or Reddit threads
I picked these signals because they’re the ones I’d act on. Tracking everything is noise. Track what changes your decisions.
The setup
I use Shogo’s Competitor Intelligence template as the base. Here’s how I configured it.
Step 1: Define the competitor list
In the agent configuration, I listed my 5 main competitors with their name, domain, LinkedIn URL, and any specific pages I want to watch closely (usually their pricing page and changelog):
“Track these competitors:
- Relevance AI (relevanceai.com) — pricing page, blog, LinkedIn
- Zapier (zapier.com) — product blog, new integrations, LinkedIn
- n8n (n8n.io) — changelog, blog, LinkedIn
- Make (make.com) — pricing page, blog, LinkedIn
- Retool (retool.com) — changelog, blog, pricing, LinkedIn”
Step 2: Connect the research tools
The agent uses two integrations for web research:
- Exa Search — semantic search that finds recent content by meaning, not just keywords. Great for finding blog posts, landing pages, and news coverage.
- Brave Search — broader web crawling for news coverage, Reddit mentions, and PR.
Both connect via a single OAuth authorization in Shogo Studio.
Step 3: Write the monitoring prompt
This is where most of the configuration lives. I wrote a detailed prompt describing exactly what the agent should look for:
“Every Sunday night, research each competitor on my list. For each one:
Check if they’ve published any new blog posts, case studies, or landing pages in the past 7 days. Note the title and URL.
Check for any changes to their pricing page. If you detect a price change, new plan, or new pricing language, highlight this.
Check their LinkedIn company page and founder LinkedIn pages for new posts. Summarize any posts about product updates, customer wins, or company news.
Search for any news coverage mentioning the competitor in the past 7 days.
Check their job listings for new roles that suggest a strategic shift — enterprise sales, new verticals, key hires.
Check G2 and Capterra for any new reviews in the past 7 days. Summarize themes in the positive and negative reviews.
Organize the output as a weekly briefing. Start with a one-line ‘nothing changed’ for any competitor where nothing notable happened. For competitors where something changed, give a bulleted summary of each signal with a link to the source.
End with a ‘so what’ section — one paragraph summarizing the most strategically significant thing that happened this week across all competitors combined.”
Step 4: Connect Slack delivery
I created a private Slack channel called #competitive-intel and connected it as the delivery destination. The briefing arrives every Monday at 7am.
Step 5: Test run
I ran the agent manually on a Thursday to see the first output. The structure was right but a few things needed tuning:
- It was surfacing blog posts that were promotional noise rather than product-relevant. I added: “Ignore blog posts that are primarily marketing content about general AI trends — focus on posts about product features, customer use cases, or competitive comparisons.”
- The LinkedIn section was too long. I added: “For LinkedIn posts, only include ones that reveal something about product direction, customer results, or company strategy. Skip posts that are just general thought leadership.”
One test run, two adjustments, and it’s been running clean ever since.
What the briefing looks like
Here’s a recent Monday briefing (paraphrased):
Competitive Intel — Week of March 10
Relevance AI: New blog post: “How to build an AI workforce in 90 days” — positions them for enterprise “AI workforce replacement” framing. New customer logo: Canva added to homepage. Job posting: Senior Enterprise AE (indicates continued upmarket push).
Zapier: Updated their AI automation landing page — new header copy. Previously “automate your work” is now “AI automation for teams.” Suggests they’re leaning into the AI framing harder. No pricing changes detected.
n8n: Changelog update — added 3 new AI nodes (Anthropic Claude, Mistral, Cohere). This closes a capability gap vs Make. Two new blog posts targeting “Zapier alternative” and “open source automation.”
Make: No significant changes. One blog post on general automation trends.
Retool: Two new job postings for ML engineers. Could indicate AI feature development accelerating. Pricing page: no changes.
So what this week: The most significant signal is n8n expanding their AI model support. They’re the fastest-moving in the open-source tier and their “Zapier alternative” content push is gaining traction. Worth monitoring whether their Google rankings are improving on those terms. Zapier’s messaging shift toward “AI automation” suggests the entire category is converging on AI positioning — which is good for us but means the space is getting noisier.
Twenty minutes of reading. Three hours saved.
How I use the briefing
I don’t just read it and file it away. I have a lightweight process for acting on it:
Pricing changes: Immediately review against our own pricing. If a competitor drops price, I want to know why and decide whether to respond.
New landing pages targeting our keywords: Add to my content backlog. If they’re targeting “automate GitHub PR review” and we’re not, we need a page for that.
New integrations: Check if it’s something our customers ask us for. If yes, reprioritize on the roadmap.
Job postings: Usually a 3–6 month leading indicator. “Head of Enterprise Sales” today means enterprise GTM in Q3. Worth noting.
Customer reviews: Direct voice-of-customer about competitor weaknesses. These are your positioning opportunities.
The cost: about $2 a week
The agent runs once a week, researching 5 competitors across multiple signals. At Shogo’s credit pricing, this costs roughly $2 per weekly run. Compared to three hours of my time, the ROI is obvious.
For the free tier (100 credits/day), weekly competitive monitoring runs fit comfortably without needing a paid plan unless you’re tracking 10+ competitors with deep monitoring.
A few things it doesn’t catch
Private pricing conversations: Changes to enterprise or custom pricing that aren’t published publicly won’t show up.
Product demos or sales deck changes: The agent can only read what’s publicly accessible.
Stealth moves: If a competitor is working on something they haven’t announced publicly, no amount of web monitoring will surface it. For that you need customer conversations and sales intelligence tools.
But for the vast majority of strategic competitive signals — product direction, messaging changes, GTM moves, content strategy — a weekly automated briefing catches 90% of what you’d find doing it manually.
Try it yourself
The Competitor Intelligence template in Shogo Studio is pre-configured for this exact workflow. Connect Exa and Brave Search (both free tiers are plenty), add your competitor list, customize the prompt for what matters to you, and set a weekly schedule.
First briefing arrives Sunday night.
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