Competitor Radar

Monitor your competitors' publicly observable footprint and get a clean, evidence-backed feed of what changed between runs — pricing moves, new job/careers pages, technology-stack shifts, content/messaging edits, and fresh news mentions. Every record cites the concrete observation behind it; the Actor never invents conclusions.

What does this Actor do?

For each competitor URL it fetches the page and captures a lightweight state snapshot:

• page title and metaDescription,
• a fingerprint (hash) of the page headings,
• detected technologies (CMS / frameworks / analytics),
• priceHints — any prices found on the page,
• links to pricing, careers, jobs and blog pages.

The snapshot is stored in the Apify key-value store and diffed against the previous run. The first run establishes a baseline; later runs emit one change record per differing field. For a list of companyNames + keywords it also tracks public news mentions via Google News and emits a record for each new headline.

Why use it?

• Sales & product teams get an automatic, auditable competitive-intelligence feed instead of manually re-checking competitor sites.
• Because every change ships with previousValue, newValue and evidence, you can trust and act on it directly.

How to use it

1. Add one or more competitor URLs (and/or company names + keywords for news).
2. Choose a monitoring mode (full, pricing, jobs, content, or news).
3. Run once to capture the baseline, then schedule it (hourly/daily) — each later run reports only what changed.

Input

Field	Type	Description
competitorUrls	array	Public competitor page URLs to monitor.
companyNames	array	Company names to track in public news.
keywords	array	Extra keywords added to each news query.
startUrls	array	Alternative URL input (requestListSources).
monitoringMode	string	full, pricing, jobs, content, news (default full).
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings for page fetches.

Input example

{
  "competitorUrls": ["https://competitor.com", "https://competitor.com/pricing"],
  "companyNames": ["Competitor Inc"],
  "keywords": ["funding", "launch"],
  "monitoringMode": "full"
}

Output

One record per detected change (or baseline). Fields:

Field	Description
company	Competitor domain (page changes) or company name (news).
changeType	baseline, added, removed, changed, or news_mention.
field	Which snapshot field changed (e.g. priceHints, title).
previousValue / newValue	The before/after values.
importance	high / medium / low.
evidence	Human-readable statement of the observation.
sourceUrl	The URL the change was observed on.
timestamp	When the change was detected (UTC ISO-8601).

Output example

{
  "company": "competitor.com",
  "changeType": "changed",
  "field": "priceHints",
  "previousValue": ["49 USD"],
  "newValue": ["59 USD"],
  "importance": "high",
  "evidence": "'priceHints' changed on https://competitor.com: '49 USD' -> '59 USD'",
  "sourceUrl": "https://competitor.com",
  "timestamp": "2026-08-12T00:00:00+00:00"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Monitoring & state

• State snapshots are persisted in the Apify key-value store (namespaces competitor for pages and competitor-news for news). The first run is a baseline; nothing is reported as "changed" until a later run differs.
• Schedule the Actor to build a change history over time.