How I track competitors automatically every week

Keeping an eye on competitors is one of those tasks everyone agrees matters and nobody actually does. It is not hard — it is just an hour of scrolling that never feels urgent enough to start.

Done by hand, competitor research has two failure modes, and I hit both. When work is busy, you skip it for weeks at a time; and when you do it, you skim, miss the signal, and call it done. The result is that you find out a rival shipped a feature, made a key hire, or raised a round from a client mentioning it — the worst possible source.

So at Northwind I stopped doing it by hand. A script now watches our rivals every week and sends me a short recap on Sunday evening.

How it works

For each competitor the script watches three sources: their blog RSS feed for launches and announcements, their LinkedIn job posts because hiring tells you where they are investing, and HN and Twitter mentions for the conversation around them. Shipping, hiring, and raising are the three things I actually care about, and those three sources cover all of them well enough.

The weekly run is a simple chain:

1. Once a week, the script fetches every source for every competitor.
2. It diffs the results against last week’s snapshot.
3. Anything new — and only what is new — goes to Claude for a 5-bullet summary.
4. The script emails me the recap on Sunday evening.

The diff step is the important one: I never read the same item twice, so the recap is always genuinely “what changed”. This fetch-diff-summarise pattern is the one from Build a competitor-mention monitor, which I adapted to cover several competitors at once.

What was tricky, and what I kept human

The AI summary needed guardrails. Early on it would pad five bullets out of two real items, or treat a reposted blog entry as news. Two things fixed most of it: a solid diff, so only genuinely new items ever reach the model, and a prompt that allows fewer than five bullets — a quiet week should look like a quiet week. Even so, I would not trust the summary blindly; it points me at things, and I still click through on anything that matters.

The bigger boundary is what I left to a human entirely. The script tells me a rival is hiring three backend engineers, but it does not tell me what that means for Northwind. That interpretation — the “so what” — is mine. The automation removes the scrolling, not the thinking, and I am happy with that split.

Was it worth it

Plainly, yes:

• I notice the things I should notice — ships, hires, raises.
• It costs me a two-minute read on Sunday, not an hour of scrolling I skip.
• Because it is automatic, it actually happens every week.

The hardest part of competitor tracking is consistency, not insight. Hand the fetching and diffing to a script and the AI a draft summary — then the only thing left for you is the part you are actually good at.