How to track changes to a competitor's website
A competitor's website is one of the best free sources of market information there is. New prices, new products, changed terms and new job adverts all show up there before anyone announces them. The problem is that nobody has time to read a rival's whole site every week. This guide covers which pages matter, how to watch them without drowning in alerts, and what to do with what you learn.
Which pages tell you the most
Most of a website rarely changes in a way that matters. A handful of pages do most of the talking:
- Pricing page: plan prices, what each plan includes, and new discounts
- Shop or product pages: new products, price changes and items going out of stock
- Terms, shipping and returns: changes to fees, delivery thresholds and refund rules
- Careers: who they're hiring, and where, hints at what they plan to do next
- News, blog or changelog: launches, partnerships and features
- Homepage: the main message and any sale banners
The common ways to do it
Teams tend to use one of these, and each has its place:
- A shared spreadsheet and a calendar reminder. Cheap and flexible, but it depends on someone remembering, and spotting small edits by eye is hard.
- Newsletters and social accounts. Worth following, but companies only announce what they want you to notice. Quiet price rises and terms changes rarely get a post.
- Browser extensions that watch pages. Quick to set up, but they usually only run while your browser is open.
- Dedicated competitor intelligence platforms. Some cover ads, reviews and much more. They can be a good fit for larger teams, but may be more than a small business needs.
- A website change monitor. It checks chosen pages from its own servers and tells you what changed.
For most small teams, a monitor on a few well-chosen pages plus a quick weekly read gives the most value for the least effort.
Watch a whole competitor in one go
Finding the right pages on each competitor's site takes time. In ChangeGist you can type a competitor's address, such as competitor.com, and it suggests the pages worth watching, like their pricing, shop, terms, careers and news pages. Tick the ones you want and they're all monitored from then on.
Keep the alerts useful
Watching six pages for each of five competitors is thirty pages, and some will change often. A few habits keep that manageable:
- Use alert rules to filter. For example, “only tell me about price changes” on a shop page, or “only new jobs in sales” on a careers page.
- Use the weekly Monday summary email to read everything in one sitting instead of one email at a time.
- Send alerts to a shared Slack or Discord channel on Pro and Business, so the whole team sees them without forwarding.
- Remove pages that never produce anything useful after a couple of months.
Turn changes into decisions
An alert only matters if it changes what you do. When something comes in, ask three questions: does it affect our customers, does it affect our prices or positioning, and do we need to do anything this week? Most of the time the answer is no, and that's fine. Knowing nothing important changed is useful too.
Over months, the history becomes valuable on its own. You can see that a rival puts prices up every spring, or that a new product line followed a burst of hiring.
How often to check
Competitor pages rarely need minute-by-minute checks. Every few hours suits most pricing and product pages, and once a day is plenty for terms and careers pages. If you sell in a market where prices move daily, check more often on the pages that matter most and less often on the rest.
Keep it fair
Only watch public pages that any customer could see. Don't try to get behind logins, and don't hammer a site with constant requests. ChangeGist respects robots.txt and only checks public pages. It also never sells your data or uses it to train AI, so which competitors you watch stays your business.