How do you keep track of competitors?
For a long time I thought I was doing a good job keeping an eye on competitors. Looking back, I was mostly opening the same few websites every week, scrolling for a couple of minutes, and hoping I would notice anything important. Sometimes I did, but most of the time I forgot what I saw almost immediately.
The annoying part is that competitor updates aren't important enough to spend an hour checking every day, but they're important enough that missing them can actually matter. A few times I learned about pricing changes or new features from customers before I noticed them myself, which is kind of embarrassing when you're supposed to know your market.
I tried Google Alerts, newsletters, and even a spreadsheet where I tracked updates manually. None of it lasted very long. The information wasn't hard to find. The hard part was remembering to keep checking consistently.
A few weeks ago I started using a simple AI-based workflow that checks a list of sites for me and only lets me know when something changes. Most days I get nothing, which feels perfect. Recently it caught a pricing change on a competitor's site that I probably wouldn't have noticed until much later.
The biggest difference isn't that I have more information now. It's that I don't have to keep thinking about it anymore.
How do you all handle competitor tracking? Do you have a system, or do you just check things whenever you remember?