competitor-watch

What This Skill Does

Competitor Watch acts as a 24/7 competitive intelligence unit for your organization. Rather than relying on manual, periodic checking of competitor websites, this skill automates the entire surveillance lifecycle. It utilizes smart diffing technology to ignore "noise" like dynamic timestamps or ad injectors, focusing exclusively on substantive changes such as pricing updates, new feature launches, blog post announcements, or modifications to documentation pages. The skill operates on a tiered framework, allowing you to allocate intensive resources—such as frequent scraping and deep content analysis—toward your "fierce" rivals while maintaining high-level oversight for adjacent market players.

Beyond simple change detection, Competitor Watch provides digestible, summarized insights. Instead of receiving raw HTML diffs that require hours of analysis, you get alerts that explain what changed and why it matters to your market position. Whether you are tracking a sudden price drop, a surprise release of a new integration, or a shift in messaging on a competitor's homepage, this agent ensures you are the first to know, giving your team the head start needed to pivot or react strategically.

Installation

To integrate Competitor Watch into your agent, follow these steps:

1. Execute the installation command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/audsmith28/competitor-watch.
2. Run the initialization script: scripts/setup.sh to generate the required local configuration and data storage directories.
3. Configure your landscape in ~/.config/competitor-watch/config.json. Define your competitor tiers (e.g., 'fierce' vs 'adjacent') and set your notification preferences.
4. Add your first competitor using the provided CLI: scripts/add-competitor.sh "CompetitorName" https://example.com --tier=fierce.
5. Verify the configuration with a dry run: scripts/check.sh --dry-run.
6. Schedule the task using your system's cron or a standard heartbeat mechanism to run every 30-60 minutes.

Use Cases

• Strategic Product Launch Defense: Monitor competitor documentation and product pages to detect new feature releases before they reach full public adoption.
• Pricing Elasticity Tracking: Automatically flag when a competitor changes their pricing tiers, allowing your sales team to prepare counter-arguments or defensive positioning.
• Market Messaging Shifts: Detect changes in competitor homepage value propositions to see if they are pivoting their focus, enabling you to adjust your own marketing copy accordingly.
• Content Pipeline Analysis: Keep tabs on competitor blogs and whitepapers to identify the topics they are prioritizing, helping you perform gap analysis on your own content strategy.

Example Prompts

1. "Competitor Watch, please summarize the top three changes detected on the Acme Corp pricing page over the last 48 hours and explain how this impacts our current entry-level offering."
2. "Show me all new feature announcements posted to the blogs of our fierce-tier competitors this week."
3. "Update the monitoring frequency for our secondary competitor 'TechCo' from 'watching' to 'important' because they just launched a new product category."

Tips & Limitations

• Optimize Your Tiers: Don't treat every company the same. Set high-frequency checks only for your top 3 rivals to avoid excessive network usage and alert fatigue.
• Ignore Patterns: Make heavy use of the ignore_patterns in your config file. This is crucial for filtering out legitimate page updates that don't carry strategic value, like footer changes or cookie banners.
• Limitations: The skill relies on public-facing web content. It cannot "see" behind login walls, password-protected portals, or gated content that requires session authentication. Ensure your targets have accessible, crawlable public pages for maximum effectiveness.