Monitoring
What CompetLab watches
CompetLab tracks five 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 | How ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini name and rank you when buyers ask for a recommendation. |
| 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 whether AI crawlers can reach them. |
These five are the dimensions CompetLab monitors. The monthly Strategic Briefing goes wider — thirteen dimensions in all, the five 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. You pick the frequency from a set of presets, anywhere 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 carries its own default — AI Visibility starts at weekly, for instance — and you can turn any dimension on or off and change 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 if you’d rather monitor scheduling health from code.
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 monthly 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?
Five dimensions of your competitive position, tracked continuously against the competitors you name: AI Visibility (how ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini answer about your space), 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 whether AI crawlers 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 five also feed the monthly Strategic Briefing, which adds eight more researched dimensions on top for thirteen in all.
How often does monitoring run?
You choose, per dimension. Each one runs on its own schedule, set from presets that range from daily to monthly — every day, every three days, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. Dimensions start with sensible defaults (AI Visibility begins at weekly, for example) and you can change any of them, or pause a dimension entirely, without affecting the others. 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 if you want to watch for stalls from code.
What's the difference between monitoring and the Strategic Briefing?
Monitoring is the raw, continuous layer — five dimensions, checked on a schedule, with dashboards, history, and alerts. The Strategic Briefing is the analyzed layer on top: a monthly synthesis 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 the actions worth taking. Put simply, monitoring tells you what's happening as it happens; the briefing tells you what to do about it, once a month. 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, your rank shifting on one of the engines. 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.