Competitor Analysis

14.3. Competitor Analysis — Analyzing Competitors

Not just an ordinary page-diff watcher

This is the single most important thing to understand about the official Competitor News Monitor skill: it is not merely a page-diffing tool — it applies company news classification by category, source hierarchy, event de-duplication, and business-importance scoring. The goal is to watch a declared set of companies and report only developments that are truly important, new, and backed by evidence from the original source.

Set up once, run on schedule forever

The setup runs in the foreground exactly once — recording official company names, domains, products, aliases, geographic/language regions, the event categories to track, the frequency, the audience, and the “notable” threshold — after which the periodic checks run as a cron tick, pre-built with the competitor-watch automation blueprint.

Clear boundaries: when to use this skill, when not to

This skill is not for one-time research about a company (use web_search/web_extract directly instead) or for ordinary feed reading (use the separate blogwatcher skill) — this is an important dividing line to avoid using the wrong tool for the wrong need.

Why “report deltas, not dumps”

Because the agent remembers previous runs, it reports what actually changed, not the full data scanned every time — scanning a competitor’s changelog, pricing page, and release notes weekly, comparing against last week’s run, and summarizing only the parts that truly changed.

Notes

• Declare the “materiality” threshold clearly at the setup step — otherwise the job easily falls into reporting every trivial change, going against the [SILENT] principle described in chapter 12.6.
• Combine with multi-source (14.2): for each competitor, don’t just watch a single page but also the changelog, pricing page, and release notes — the source hierarchy in the skill helps separate news from official sources (company blog) from rumors/speculation from third parties.
• If you need an in-depth analysis of one specific competitor right now (not continuous monitoring), don’t use this skill — go back to direct web_search/web_extract for one-off needs.