Competitor Intelligence

How it works

The pipeline runs in three stages — all automatic, no API keys required from you:

1. 1
   Scrape — SiteBrief fetches the homepage, pricing page, and any other URLs you configured for each competitor. Text content is extracted and stored. A hash-based diff detects exactly which pages changed since last week.
2. 2
   Analyse — For each competitor, Claude reads the page content plus recent mentions from Hacker News and Reddit. It extracts positioning, pricing model, customer pain points, and one concrete action you can take this week.
3. 3
   Brief— All per-competitor analyses are synthesised into one weekly brief with six sections: Top Insight, By Competitor, Customer Complaints, Where They're Heading, Top 3 Actions, and Watch Next Week. The brief is emailed to you every Monday at 9 AM.

Setting up

Navigate to Competitors in the left sidebar. If you manage multiple sites, select the site you want to track competitors for using the dropdown at the top.

Click + Add competitor, enter a display name and the competitor's URL. SiteBrief will automatically scrape the homepage. You can add up to 10 competitors per site.

To generate your first brief immediately (without waiting for Monday), click Generate Weekly Brief. The process takes 10–30 seconds depending on the number of competitors.

The weekly brief

Every brief follows the same six-section structure:

Change detection

Every competitor card shows a status badge after the scrape runs:

• Changes detected — The page content hash differs from last week. This competitor updated their site. The brief will highlight what changed.
• No changes — Content is identical to last week's snapshot.
• Not checked yet — This competitor was added after the last automatic scrape. Click Generate Weekly Brief to run a manual check.

Community mentions (Reddit & HN)

For each competitor, SiteBrief searches the following subreddits: sysadmin, selfhosted, webdev, devops, and SaaS, plus Hacker News stories and comments.

Complaints are extracted using sentiment keywords — words like “slow”, “expensive”, “switched away”, “alternative”. These become the Customer Complaints section of the brief, which you can use directly as sales talking points.

All requests use public APIs — no Reddit or HN account required.

Automatic schedule

The cron job runs every Monday at 09:00 UTC. It processes all users with configured competitors, runs the full pipeline (scrape → analyse → brief), and sends the result by email to the account's registered address.

You can also trigger a manual brief at any time from the Competitors page — useful after you first add competitors, or after a competitor launches a new product.

Limits

Privacy & data

Scraped competitor content is stored as text snapshots in your account and used only to generate your briefs. SiteBrief does not sell or share this data. Snapshots are updated weekly — the previous version is overwritten on each scrape.