Competitor Market Watch
Every night we check the competitors you name. Monday morning you get one briefing: what they added, what they removed, what they are now charging, and where their website beats yours. The rest of the week you hear nothing.
Here is how you find out a competitor moved, today. A customer you have had for six years mentions, on the way out, that they are trying someone else. Or you notice a van in a driveway you used to park in. By then the page they built to win that work has been live for four months, and you are not responding to a move, you are absorbing a loss.
Nothing about that is a failure of effort. You cannot read nine competitors' websites every night after a full day of running your own business. Nobody can, which is exactly why the ones who do it anyway win ground quietly for years.
What gets checked, every night
Four kinds of difference, measured rather than estimated. Each one is a comparison against last night's copy of the same page.
| Signal | Why it is the one worth having |
|---|---|
| New pages | The earliest warning there is. A competitor publishes the page before they announce the service, and it sits in their sitemap for weeks beforehand. This is how you hear about a launch while it is still a draft nobody has promoted. |
| Pages removed | Just as loud, and almost nobody watches it. A service page that quietly disappears means they stopped selling something. That is a market they have just handed back. |
| Price changes | Any currency figure that appears, vanishes or moves on the pages you care about, including the one inside their buy button. You find out the week they reprice, not the quarter after. |
| Copy changes | Sentences added to or removed from their key pages. A rewritten homepage headline tells you who they have decided to be, usually before the campaign that announces it. |
| Technical scorecard | Thirteen checks on every tracked site and on yours, scored the same way, so you can see exactly where they are beating you and by how much. |
What the Monday briefing looks like
Plain text, no dashboard to learn, no login. This is the real format, with a sample competitor standing in for yours.
COMPETITOR MARKET WATCH
Week ending Monday 12 October 2026
================================================================
YOUR SITE: https://yourbusiness.ca
technical score 11 of 13
2 of 3 tracked competitors moved this week.
----------------------------------------------------------------
RIVAL HOLDINGS https://example-rival.ca
technical score 8 of 13 failing: Meta description, HSTS header
NEW PAGES (2), the earliest signal there is:
+ https://example-rival.ca/emergency-24-hour-service.html
+ https://example-rival.ca/locations/barrie.html
PRICE CHANGE on https://example-rival.ca/pricing
now showing: $189
no longer: $149
NEW COPY:
+ Same day callouts across York Region, seven days a week.
----------------------------------------------------------------
SECOND RIVAL https://example-two.ca
No change detected.
================================================================
Two things in that sample are worth more than the rest of the briefing combined. They opened a Barrie location page, so they are expanding into a town you may already serve. And they raised their price by forty dollars, which means you now know the ceiling moved and you can decide whether to follow it or undercut it deliberately.
What it costs
Check the market before you take our word for it. Kompyte, which belongs to Semrush, starts around $300 US a month. Crayon runs roughly $1,000 to $2,000 US a month and sells annually at $15,000 to $40,000. Klue is around $1,500 US a month and charges separately per seat depending on whether the person is managing the intelligence or just reading it.
Those are built for companies with a product marketing department. This is built for the owner, priced in Canadian dollars, and it arrives as an email you read in four minutes.
Competitor Market Watch
$350 CAD / month
Pay by Interac e-Transfer or PayPal, monthly. Cancel any time, no card on file.
- Up to three competitors, watched every night
- New pages, removed pages, price changes, copy changes
- Thirteen point scorecard on them and on you
- One briefing every Monday morning
- robots.txt honoured, every skip disclosed
- Cancel any time
The arithmetic
$4,200 CAD / year
- That is what this costs you over twelve months.
- We are not going to invent a figure for what not knowing costs you, because we do not know your margins and anyone who quotes you one is guessing.
- So do it yourself. Take one contract you lost to a competitor in the last two years. Multiply it by what that customer would have been worth over five.
- If that number is bigger than $4,200, the decision is already made. If it is smaller, do not buy this.
What this is not
The limits matter more than the features, because the limits are where people get sold things that do not work.
- It does not report ad spend or paid keywords. Those come from paid data subscriptions, not from reading a website. Any monthly service claiming to derive them from a crawl is estimating and hoping you do not ask. We will quote that work separately, using the tools that genuinely have the data.
- It does not watch their social accounts or ad library. Different sources, different permissions, and worth doing properly rather than badly.
- It does not tell you what to do. It tells you what moved, early and accurately. What you do about a rival's new Barrie page is a decision only you can make, and a briefing that pretended otherwise would be worth less, not more.
- It is not a dashboard. Deliberately. Dashboards get logged into twice and then never again. An email gets read.
Questions
How do you know what a competitor changed?
The engine keeps last night's copy of every page it watches, plus the full list of URLs in their sitemap. Tonight it fetches the same pages and compares. A sentence that was not there yesterday, a page that appeared, a price that moved: those are differences, not guesses. If nothing changed, the briefing says nothing changed, which is a real answer and the most common one.
Why is a new page the signal you lead with?
Because it is the earliest one that exists. A competitor builds the page before they announce the service. It goes into their sitemap the day it is published and sits there, often for weeks, before a single ad runs or a single customer hears about it. By the time you would have found out the normal way, from a customer telling you they went elsewhere, you are months behind. This is the gap the whole product lives in.
Do you track their ad spend and keywords?
No, and this is where you should be careful who you buy from. Ad spend figures and paid keyword lists come from data subscriptions like Semrush or SpyFu. Nobody derives them by reading a website, and any monthly service claiming to is either reselling that data or estimating and not telling you which. We would rather say plainly that this product measures what it can measure. If you want ad and keyword intelligence, that is a separate piece of work using paid tooling, quoted separately.
Is scraping their website legal?
We fetch public pages, once a night, the same way a browser does, and we honour robots.txt. If a competitor's robots.txt disallows a path, the engine skips it and the briefing says it was skipped. The request identifies itself honestly and links back to this page, so nobody has to wonder who is visiting. That is one fetch per page per day, which is less traffic than a single curious visitor.
Why Monday, and not an alert the moment something happens?
Because competitor moves are not emergencies and treating them as one trains you to ignore the alerts. A rival changing their pricing page is something you want to think about with a coffee, not something you need woken up for. The engine checks nightly so nothing is missed, then holds it until Monday so you read it once, properly, instead of skimming seven notifications. Your own website is the opposite case, which is why Site Watch emails you the morning yours breaks.
How many competitors can I watch?
Up to three on this price, and the honest answer is that three is usually the right number. Most owners can name the two or three businesses that actually take work off them. Watching twelve produces a briefing nobody reads. If you genuinely need more, say so on the call and we will price it.
Can I cancel?
Any time, and it runs to the end of the month you have paid for. No contract, no cancellation call to sit through.
Start this week
Name your competitors and the first run happens that night. That becomes the baseline, and the first real briefing lands the following Monday. The baseline week is honest about itself: it says baseline recorded rather than pretending to have found nothing.
Start Market Watch, $350 CAD a month
Want your own site watched instead of theirs? Site Watch is $79 CAD a month and emails you the morning yours breaks. Most businesses should have that one first. Prefer to talk to a person? Book a call and we will run the first comparison on the phone with you.
Want one measurement rather than a subscription? The Competitor Teardown is $297 one time: your site against up to three of theirs on 25 technical checks. The Blind Spot Report at $497 one time goes further and reports what they sell that you never mention.
Not ready to pay for anything? The free one-off check scores any website on the spot, including a competitor's, and the free monthly compliance letter stays free.