Competitor monitor

Summary#

Competitor Monitor, called Watchtower on screen, re-fetches the competitor pages you give it every six hours and tells you what changed since last time. It compares prices, titles, meta descriptions, headings, navigation, structured data, contact details and page size, grades each change as High, Medium or Low, and collects them into a change feed. Adding a URL costs nothing and takes one field.

Purpose#

Competitors announce almost nothing. A price moves, a plan is renamed, a claim on the pricing page is softened, a product quietly disappears — and the only people told are the ones who happened to look that day. Checking a handful of pages by hand is the sort of task that gets done for two weeks and then forgotten.

Watchtower does the looking. Because it keeps a copy of what the page said last time, it can tell you what changed rather than just that the page is different, which is the difference between a useful alert and a notification you learn to ignore.

Requirements#

• A signed-in Metric Vault account. Tracked URLs are saved to your account, so they keep running when the dashboard is closed.
• A publicly reachable http or https URL. Pages behind a login, on a private network, or on an internal hostname are rejected.

No plan upgrade and no credits are needed.

Permissions#

Monitored URLs belong to the workspace rather than the individual, so a teammate you have invited sees your list and you see theirs. See What teammates share.

Navigation Path#

Competitors & Backlinks → Competitor Monitor

The screen's own heading is Watchtower.

Step-by-Step Guide#

Add a URL to watch#

1. Enter the address in the first field, placeholder e.g. nike.com. A bare domain works; https:// is added for you. Point it at a specific page such as a pricing page rather than a homepage — a homepage changes for reasons that are rarely about you.
2. Choose what you are watching for in the dropdown: Watch everything, Pricing only, Titles & meta, Page structure or Availability. This is recorded against the URL and shown in the Type column.
3. Optionally add a label, placeholder Label (optional, e.g., 'Pricing'). The label is what appears in alerts, so name it for the thing you care about.
4. Leave the interval dropdown on Check every 6h (recommended).
5. Press Monitor URL. The button reads Adding + first check… while it works, then returns to + Monitor URL.

The first check runs immediately, which is why adding a URL takes a few seconds rather than being instant. That first check records a baseline and produces no changes; there is nothing yet to compare against. The screen switches to the Monitored URLs tab so you can see what was added.

Try it without picking targets#

Press Start with sample URLs on the empty state. Four public pages are added with a Pricing or product label — Shopify's pricing page, Stripe's pricing page, a Notion product page and Figma's what's-new page — and the screen switches to the Monitored URLs tab. Delete them once you have seen how a change row looks.

Force a check now#

On the Monitored URLs tab, press Check now on the row. The button reads Checking… while the page is fetched, and the table refreshes with the new Last Check time. This counts as that URL's check, so the next automatic one is six hours later.

Use it after you know a competitor has just shipped something, rather than as a routine. Two checks minutes apart usually find nothing.

Pause or remove a URL#

• Pause stops the automatic checks and keeps the history. The Status column changes from Active to Paused and the button becomes Resume.
• The × button deletes it. You are asked to confirm with Stop monitoring this URL? All snapshots and change history will be deleted. and the confirm button reads Stop monitoring. That deletion cannot be undone, so pause first if you are unsure.

Read the change feed#

The Change Feed tab lists the most recent changes across every monitored URL, newest first, up to 200 rows. Each row carries a change-type chip, a severity label, the page it happened on, its label, and how long ago it was detected. Where a value changed, the old value is struck through in red above the new value in green, and a price move shows the numeric difference.

Two buttons on each row: the eye marks the change as read and dims it, and the × dismisses it so it never appears again. Mark all read at the top of the bar clears them in one go, and Refresh re-reads the feed.

What each check captures#

Watchtower stores a snapshot of the page on every visit and compares it with the previous one. These are the signals it keeps.

Only the first 500,000 characters of a page are examined, which covers ordinary pages comfortably. Content that a browser loads afterwards with JavaScript is not seen, because the page is fetched as the server sends it.

What counts as a change#

A page that is edited heavily produces several rows from one check, which is intended: each is a separate fact you might act on.

What does not become an alert#

Every row above is recorded in the change history. Two kinds are held back from the alert channels, because an alert you learn to ignore is worse than no alert.

The same event twice. An event is identified by the page, the kind of change, and the values before and after. If the identical event is detected again within 24 hours, it is recorded and counted but not sent a second time. A change that is genuinely news again the next day still reaches you, and "the title became B" and "the title went back to A" are different events, so a page that flips between two titles is not silenced, it is reported as the two facts it is.

Elements that rotate. A carousel, a "recently viewed" strip or a rotating testimonial makes a heading, nav item, schema type or social link appear and disappear on its own. Each flip looks like a real addition or removal to the differ, and used to be sent as one.

Those four kinds of event are now held for one check and released only if the next check finds the element still in the state that was reported. If it flipped back, the element is treated as rotating page furniture and silenced for 48 hours. A carousel that changes on every crawl now produces no alerts at all, where over two days it used to produce eight.

The cost is that a genuine addition or removal reaches you one check interval later than it used to, six hours on the default setting. Status codes, titles, prices and word counts are not held: the value itself is the news there, so they are sent as soon as they are seen.

The Monitored URLs table#

The Price Tracker tab#

For each monitored URL that has produced prices, this tab shows the current minimum, maximum, average and number of prices found, a small trend line of the recent minimums, and the last check time. It reads the last twenty snapshots of up to thirty URLs.

Before any prices have been detected it reads No prices detected yet. Prices are extracted from common currency formats ($X.XX, £X.XX, €X.XX). They appear here after the first check. A page whose prices are drawn by JavaScript after load, or written in a currency format outside those three, will stay empty.

Alerts and where they go#

Every change is written to the change feed, and competitor changes from the last 14 days also appear in the notifications feed behind the bell icon, controlled by the Competitor Alerts switch in Account → Preferences.

Slack, webhook and email delivery are configured on the individual monitored URL rather than on your account. Until an alert channel is stored on a URL, the card near the top of the screen reads Watchtower alert channels / Not configured — changes detected but no alerts sent, and that is exactly what it means: changes are still detected, recorded and shown in the app, but no message is sent anywhere.

The Email me on high-severity changes checkbox records a preference against the URL. Watchtower's own emails are addressed to the alert address stored on that monitored URL, which this screen does not collect, so ticking the box on its own does not produce email. Every notification you can receive lists every channel and where each is configured.

Limitations#

• Pages are fetched as the server sends them, so anything rendered by JavaScript in the browser is invisible to the check.
• The Advanced: CSS selector (optional) field is stored against the URL but every check compares the whole set of signals above.
• The severity and change-type dropdowns above the feed do not narrow the list today. Read the severity label on each row instead.
• Private, internal and loopback hosts are refused with That URL host is not allowed.
• A page needs two checks before it can report anything.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

How many URLs can I monitor? There is no cap on how many you add. Up to 50 due URLs are processed on each pass of the scheduler, so a very large list is worked through over successive passes rather than all at once.

Does monitoring cost credits? No. Adding a URL and every automatic check are free, on every plan.

Can I change how often a URL is checked? URLs added from this screen run on the six-hour interval, which the Every column confirms. Use Check now when you need an answer sooner.

Will it tell me about a competitor's whole site? No. Watchtower watches the exact pages you give it. Add the handful that carry real signal: pricing, key landing pages, a product or changelog page.

Does deleting a URL delete its history? Yes. The confirmation says so: Stop monitoring this URL? All snapshots and change history will be deleted. Pause instead if you might want the history later.

Can a teammate see what I am monitoring? Yes. Monitored URLs belong to the workspace. See What teammates share.

Why does the hero say Quiet (no recent changes)? You have URLs monitored but nothing has changed in the last seven days. The other two verdicts are No URLs Monitored and Monitoring Active.