Here is how to monitor competitors without making it a second job: pick a few rivals, choose the handful of pages and topics that reveal their moves, and let a tool such as AyeWatch watch them and alert you when something you described actually changes. The setup takes an afternoon, and after that the work comes to you.
This guide is for small teams: an indie studio, a two-person app, a shop with three real rivals. No analyst, no research budget.
Step 1: name your rivals
Write down the three to five companies a customer would compare you with. Not everyone in your market, just the ones that come up in reviews, support chats or lost sales. Everyone else gets one broad topic later.
Step 2: pick the pages that give away their plans
For each rival, four pages tell you most of what you need:
| Page | Why watch it |
|---|---|
| Pricing | New tiers, discounts or a price rise show who they are chasing |
| Changelog or patch notes | What they ship, and how often |
| Careers | Who they hire hints at what comes next |
| Home page | A new headline means a new pitch |
Step 3: set up the monitors
In AyeWatch, create a page monitor for each URL. Paste the link, then write what counts as a change in your own words:
- Pricing: "Tell me if a plan, price or free tier changes."
- Changelog: "Tell me about new features, not bug fixes."
- Careers: "Tell me when they post roles in a new country or a new team."
You do not need to pick page elements or write code. Each alert arrives with a short summary, so you can read it on your phone and move on.
Step 4: add topics for the stuff off their site
A lot of competitor news never appears on the competitor's own pages. Players talk on Reddit, the studio's founder posts on X, a partner announces a deal. Add a topic monitor per rival, for example "Rival Studio new game, funding or acquisition news". AyeWatch can also watch X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok directly.
Step 5: decide where alerts land
Push alerts and the in-app feed work on every AyeWatch plan, including the free preview. If you want alerts in Slack or Discord, in email, or a daily digest, those come with paid plans, which start at $9 a month and are billed in monitoring credits.
A simple split works for small teams:
- Price and product changes: push, so you see them the same day.
- Hiring and messaging changes: a daily digest.
- Big news such as funding: a shared Slack or Discord channel.
Step 6: keep a one-line log
Each time an alert lands, add one line to a shared note: date, rival, what changed, what you might do. After a few months you will spot patterns, such as a rival that always discounts before a big launch.
Mistakes to skip
- Watching too many pages. More monitors means more alerts you ignore.
- Vague rules. "Anything new" alerts on everything. Name the change.
- Never pruning. If a monitor has not told you anything useful in two months, pause it.
- Keeping it to yourself. If only one person sees the alerts, the rest of the team keeps guessing. Share the channel or the digest.
How much time it takes after setup
Once the monitors are running, most weeks need a few minutes: skim the alerts, add a line to the log, and tweak any rule that fired on something you did not care about. AyeWatch lets you mute, pause or rewrite a monitor at any time, so tightening a noisy rule takes seconds. Once a quarter, look at your rival list again. A new name that keeps turning up in your topic alerts probably deserves page monitors of its own, and a rival that has gone quiet can drop back to a single topic.
If all you want is an email when a rival's name shows up in new search results, Google Alerts does that for free. To follow what they actually change, try AyeWatch's free preview.