Monitoring
What CompetLab watches
CompetLab tracks six dimensions continuously. Each one watches a different face of your competitive position, against the same set of competitors, and each keeps a running history you can read as a trend rather than a single snapshot.
| Dimension | What it watches |
|---|---|
| AI Visibility | Which companies the five AI answer engines name when buyers ask for a recommendation, and where you sit among them. |
| AI Sources | Which pages those engines open to answer — and whether your site is among them. |
| Positioning | How rivals describe themselves — their messaging, claims, audiences, and calls to action. |
| Pricing | Competitors’ plans, tiers, and prices, and where you sit in the market. |
| Content | What rivals publish — the pages and topics they cover, tracked as it changes. |
| Tech & Trust | Their security, tech stack, and trust signals — including which named AI assistants can reach them. |
These six are the dimensions CompetLab monitors. The Strategic Briefing goes wider — fourteen dimensions in all, the six here plus eight it researches for the briefing. See Core concepts for the full picture.
How a check works
Each dimension runs checks on its own schedule. A check is one measurement — CompetLab reads the current state of each competitor for that dimension, records what it finds, and compares it to your own. It keeps every check, so you can watch a number move over weeks rather than guess from a single reading, and it compares you against the field on the same yardstick, so the gaps are fair to read.
Between checks, CompetLab watches for meaningful change and turns it into an alert — not a raw diff, but a plain-language “here’s what moved, and here’s why it matters”:
Setting the cadence
Every dimension runs on its own schedule, so you can watch a fast-moving one closely and let a slower one tick along. Your plan sets each dimension’s clock, and you can pick a slower preset, or pause a dimension — never a faster one. The presets run from daily to monthly:
| Preset | How often |
|---|---|
| Every day | Daily |
| Every 3 days | Twice a week, roughly |
| Every week | Weekly |
| Every 2 weeks | Fortnightly |
| Every month | Monthly |
Each dimension starts on the plan’s clock — on Monitor, content and tech & trust daily, pricing and positioning every three days, the two AI dimensions weekly; on Process everything daily and the AI dimensions every three days — and you can turn any dimension on or off and slow its frequency independently of the others. Changing a cadence never costs you history; it only changes how often new points get added. Schedules are set in the project’s settings, and they’re also readable through the Schedules API.
AI Visibility has one extra control the others don’t: the buyer questions it asks are yours to edit. Tuning them never wipes your history — a marker lands on the trend chart where the wording changed. That’s covered on the AI Visibility page.
Where the runs go
Every check does double duty. In the moment, it updates the dimension’s dashboard and fires any alerts. Over time, the accumulated history is what the Strategic Briefing reads — it’s the analyzed layer on top of the raw monitoring, turning weeks of checks across all the dimensions into what changed, what it means, and what to do next.
FAQ
What does CompetLab monitor?
Six dimensions of your competitive position, tracked continuously against the competitors you name: AI Visibility (which companies the five major AI engines name when asked about your space), AI Sources (which pages those engines open to answer, and whether yours is one of them), Positioning (how rivals describe themselves), Pricing (their plans and where you sit in the market), Content (what they publish, tracked as it changes), and Tech & Trust (their security, tech stack, and which named AI assistants can reach them). Each runs on its own schedule and keeps a full history, so you read a trend rather than a one-off number. These six also feed the Strategic Briefing, which adds eight more researched dimensions on top for fourteen in all.
How often does monitoring run?
Your plan sets each dimension's clock. On Monitor, content and tech & trust run daily, pricing and positioning every three days and the two AI dimensions weekly; on Process everything runs daily and the AI dimensions every three days. You can slow any dimension with a preset, or pause it, without affecting the others — never run one faster than the plan. Because every run is stored as history, changing a cadence doesn't cost you any past data — it only changes how often new points are added. You can read each dimension's current schedule, next run, and last run through the Schedules API.
What's the difference between monitoring and the Strategic Briefing?
Monitoring is the raw, continuous layer — six dimensions, checked on a schedule, with dashboards, history, and alerts. The Strategic Briefing is the analyzed layer on top: a synthesis, every month or every two weeks on Process, that reads across all of that (plus eight further dimensions it researches for the briefing) and turns it into a narrative — what changed, what it means, and what is worth doing. Every move in the briefing lands on your Strategic Tickets board — as a new ticket, most important first, or on the ticket already there for that work. Put simply, monitoring tells you what's happening as it happens; the briefing tells you what to do about it, every month, or every two weeks on Process. Both draw on the same underlying runs, so they never disagree about the facts.
Do I get notified when something changes?
Yes. Between checks, CompetLab compares each new run to the last and raises an alert when something meaningful moves — a rival adding pages, a competitor cutting its price, a change in which companies AI models recommend as core in your market. An alert isn't a raw diff; it carries a severity, a plain-language note on what changed, and often a suggested next step. You can route alerts to email, Slack, Telegram, or a webhook, each with its own severity threshold and delivery cadence, so the important ones reach you the way you want and the noise stays out.