--- title: "Competitor monitoring checklist: what to track and when" description: "A competitor monitoring checklist for small teams: nine things to track, how often to check each one, and what to ignore." url: "https://plainrival.com/blog/competitor-monitoring-checklist" published: 2026-10-06 author: "Dan" --- # Competitor monitoring checklist: what to track and when A competitor monitoring checklist for small teams: nine things to track, how often to check each one, and what to ignore. Published 6 October 2026 · by Dan · Guides. Competitor monitoring fails in one of two ways. Either nobody does it, and you learn about a rival's new plan from a prospect. Or someone tracks everything, and the weekly update becomes forty links that nobody reads. A checklist fixes both. It says what to look at, how often, and what to skip. This one is built for a team with no analyst, where monitoring is a small part of somebody's week. ## Start with five competitors or fewer Each competitor on the list costs time every week. Five is the most a small team can follow by hand. Three is better. Pick the ones buyers compare you with, and move the rest to a "check twice a year" list. ## The checklist Nine things are worth tracking. Each has a place to look and a rhythm that matches how often it changes. **Competitor monitoring checklist** _Per competitor. Weekly items take about ten minutes together._ - **Pricing page:** Weekly. Prices, plan names, limits, the free tier and which features sit in which plan. - **Home page:** Weekly. The headline, the first screen and the main button. - **Changelog:** Weekly. What shipped, and whether three releases in a row point the same way. - **New pages:** Weekly. New feature, comparison and landing pages, found through the sitemap. - **Public complaints:** Weekly. Forum posts where their customers complain or ask for an alternative. - **Blog and newsletter:** Monthly. Topics they write about, and the customers they name. - **Careers page:** Monthly. Which teams are hiring and in which countries. - **Integrations and partners:** Monthly. New entries on the integrations page. - **Terms and security pages:** Quarterly. Data location, uptime promises and contract length. ## Why these nine ### The weekly five **Pricing page.** A price change reaches your sales calls within days. This is the one item you can't afford to check monthly. [How to track pricing changes](https://plainrival.com/blog/track-competitor-pricing-changes) covers it in detail. **Home page.** The headline is the company's answer to "who is this for?". When it changes from "for startups" to "for sales teams", they have picked a new customer. **Changelog.** One release tells you little. A run of releases about the same area tells you where the roadmap is going. **New pages.** A new page called "Acme CRM vs your product" means they now meet you in deals. Most new pages aren't linked from the menu, so [read the sitemap](https://plainrival.com/blog/find-competitor-new-pages-sitemap) to find them. **Public complaints.** A thread where their customers ask for an alternative is a list of people who might switch to you, with their reasons written out. ### The monthly three Blog posts, job ads and integration pages change slowly and say something about the next six months. A weekly check of these produces noise. Once a month, skim them and write down only what surprises you. ### The quarterly one Terms and security pages rarely change. When they do, it matters to larger buyers, for example when a competitor starts offering EU data hosting. Four checks a year are enough. ## What to leave off the list - **Every social media post.** Launches reach the changelog and the blog anyway. - **Design changes.** A new illustration style changes nothing for your customers. - **Funding news and headcount.** Interesting, and rarely something you can act on this week. - **Things behind a login.** If you would need a fake account to see it, leave it. Public pages cover what you need. ## How the time adds up Here is the checklist run by hand for 5 competitors. The weekly five take about 10 minutes per competitor. The monthly three take 15 minutes per competitor, and the quarterly check takes 10. **Running the checklist by hand, 5 competitors** | | minutes a month | | --- | --- | | Weekly five | 200 | | Monthly three | 75 | | Quarterly one | 17 | A worked example: 4 weekly rounds of 50 minutes, one monthly round of 75, and a third of a quarterly round of 50. That is close to five hours a month, and the weekly items make up most of it. They are also the easiest to automate, because they live on public pages that a tool can check. ## Hand the weekly five to a tracker Plainrival covers the weekly part of this checklist. [Website change tracking](https://plainrival.com/features/website-change-tracking) checks each watched page once a day and keeps the before and after. It finds new pages through the sitemap. [Complaint signals](https://plainrival.com/features/complaint-signals) collects public complaints and switching posts about each competitor from Hacker News. Once a week it sends [a brief of at most seven items](https://plainrival.com/features/weekly-brief), sorted by how much each one matters to you. _Product preview: an illustrative example. Companies and changes are fictional._ The monthly and quarterly items stay with you. They need a person who knows the market, and they take about an hour and a half a month. ## End every round with a decision A checklist only earns its time when a check leads to something. After each weekly round, write one line: - What changed - Who it affects - What you will do, or "nothing this week" "Nothing this week" is the right answer most of the time. Writing it down means someone looked and made the call. ## Questions about competitor monitoring ### How many competitors should I monitor? Three to five. Choose the ones buyers compare you with. Check the others twice a year. ### How often should I check competitors? Pricing, home page, changelog, new pages and public complaints weekly. Blog, careers and integrations monthly. Terms and security pages quarterly. ### Who should own competitor monitoring in a small team? One named person, usually in marketing or the founder. A shared task gets skipped the first busy week.