How to track competitor website changes without drowning in alerts
The pages worth watching, the free methods, and the setup that stops change alerts becoming something you filter to a folder and never open.
Watching a competitor's website is the cheapest competitive research there is, and the most commonly abandoned, for one reason: the alerts become noise and get filtered away.
Here is the setup that survives.
Watch the sitemap first
Before any page monitors, do this.
Go to their domain and add /sitemap.xml. You get their complete page list, usually with last modified dates. Some sites use a sitemap index pointing at several files; follow those.
Save the file with today's date. Next month, save it again and diff the two.
What you get:
- Every new page they published, including ones you would never have thought to watch.
- Every page they removed, which is often more interesting. Removing a product page means something.
- Their publishing rate, which is a better predictor of what is coming than anything on their blog.
This single habit catches more than any set of page monitors, because it does not require you to guess in advance which URLs will matter.
The diff can be ugly. If you are comfortable with a terminal, downloading both and running a diff takes ten seconds. If not, paste both lists into a spreadsheet and use a lookup.
Then pick specific pages
Now the monitors, in rough order of signal.
1. Pricing. The single highest value page. Price changes, new tiers, removed tiers, changed limits, changed annual discounts.
2. Homepage hero. Positioning changes appear here first, and they precede everything else. A new headline usually means a new campaign is two weeks out.
3. Product or features. New capabilities.
4. Careers. Genuinely underrated. Three sales hires in a new country tells you about expansion months before any announcement. Job descriptions also leak roadmap: a listing for an integrations engineer names the integrations.
5. Their comparison pages. If they publish "us vs [you]", you want to know the day it goes live, not six months later.
The tools
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 19 September 2026.
| Tool | Free tier | From | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChangeTower | Yes | $12/mo | Cheapest paid, archived screenshots |
| Visualping | Yes | $14/mo | Cleanest diffs, easy region selection |
| Distill | Yes | $15/mo | Local mode reaches pages behind a login |
All three do the job. Start on a free tier, because a handful of pages is usually all you need and you will learn what you actually want to watch.
The four rules that stop the noise
This is the part that decides whether you are still doing this in three months.
Select a region, not a page. Every decent tool lets you draw a box. Watching a whole homepage means every rotating testimonial and every updated year in the footer fires an alert.
Daily, not hourly. Competitors do not change their pricing page at 3pm on a Tuesday in a way you need to know about at 3.05pm.
Send it somewhere other than your inbox. A Slack channel or a dedicated mail folder. Alerts in your main inbox get archived unread within two weeks, reliably.
Write down why. Next to each monitor, one line: why you are watching this page and what you would do if it changed. Six months later you will not remember, and an alert with no context gets ignored.
That fourth rule is the one people skip and it is the one that matters most. An alert you cannot act on is worse than no alert, because it trains you to ignore the channel.
Screenshots beat text diffs for pricing
A specific tip. For pricing pages, make sure your tool archives a screenshot on every change, not just a text diff.
The reason: the most important pricing change is often not the number. It is a feature moving from the entry tier to a higher one. That is a price rise that does not look like one, and a numeric alert misses it completely. A screenshot history makes it obvious.
When page watching is not enough
Page monitors tell you something changed. They do not tell you what it means, and they only cover the site.
If you also want their ads, their rankings, their content cadence, their reviews and whether AI assistants recommend them, that is a company level monitor rather than a page level one. Competitors App at $14.90 a month covers site changes and email. Ours, Figo, is $49 a month for three competitors and diffs the whole page set weekly alongside eight other channels, with a written summary on Monday rather than a stream of alerts.
The honest version: if you are watching four pages on two competitors, a free tier is the right answer and you do not need us. The case for a monitor starts when the manual version has already lapsed once.
Questions people ask
How do I see new pages a competitor publishes?
Watch their sitemap.xml rather than their pages. Every new page appears there, usually with a date. A page monitor pointed at a URL that does not exist yet cannot help you.
How often should I check?
Daily is enough for almost every competitor page. Hourly generates noise without adding a decision you would have made differently.
Why do I get alerts when nothing changed?
Rotating testimonials, timestamps, ad slots and personalised content. Select a specific region of the page rather than the whole thing and most of it goes away.
Can I do this for free?
Yes. Free tiers on the change monitors cover a few pages, and saving sitemaps monthly and diffing them costs nothing at all.
See it on your own competitors
Figo checks their ads, pages, rankings, reviews and AI answers every week, then tells you what to do in plain words. Set up in two minutes.
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