Competitor Intent Intelligence

Monitor competitor prices, stock, products, assortment and merchandising — and know which changes actually matter.

Paste a competitor domain such as example.com — or direct URLs if you prefer. The Actor can automatically discover high-value commercial pages, look backward for usable public history, and evaluate meaningful newly observed changes for actionable competitor intelligence.

Instead of stopping at:

Competitor price dropped 12%.

you can get:

What changed: Competitor price dropped 12%.
Likely move: Short-term promotion rather than permanent repricing.
Why: Price cut + merchandising change + recent assortment expansion.
What may happen next: The promotion may end or expand to additional products.
Recommended action: Hold your base price and monitor the promoted SKUs before matching the discount.

Use it for competitor monitoring, price tracking, stock monitoring, assortment intelligence and ecommerce competitive analysis.

From domain to decision

You do not need to hunt for every page manually. Add a competitor domain and the Actor can automatically prioritize public pages such as pricing, product/collection/catalog, promotions and updates/news. Each selected page then enters the same monitoring and first-run historical-intelligence pipeline.

Domain → discover commercial pages → establish a baseline or historical context → detect fresh changes → evaluate evidence → recommend an action when justified.

Page discovery itself is not the intelligence. The value is using discovery to reduce setup friction and immediately feed evidence into the decision engine.

What can you monitor?

Track public competitor pages for:

• Price increases and price drops
• Stock and availability changes
• Product and assortment changes
• New or removed products
• Merchandising changes
• Promotional activity
• Commercial messaging changes
• Related competitor moves across repeated runs

The Actor keeps monitoring state so later runs can identify meaningful changes instead of returning another raw page snapshot.

More than a website change detector

Most website monitors answer:

What changed?

Competitor Intent Intelligence is designed to go further:

What changed → what might it mean → what evidence supports it → what contradicts it → what may happen next → what should I do?

Depending on the available evidence, the Actor can return:

• Observed commercial event
• Likely commercial intent
• Supporting evidence
• Counter-evidence
• Alternative hypotheses
• Confidence and evidence quality
• Predicted next move
• Recommended response
• Opportunity signal
• Decision brief

Intent is an inference from observable evidence, not a proven fact. When evidence is weak, the Actor preserves uncertainty instead of inventing a confident conclusion.

Why use this instead of a basic price tracker?

A basic monitor might tell you:

Price changed from $99 to $87.

That is useful data, but it still leaves the commercial decision to you.

This Actor is built to help answer questions such as:

• Is this likely a temporary promotion or permanent repricing?
• Is the competitor changing one product or an entire category?
• Is a stock change isolated or part of a wider commercial move?
• Is assortment expanding or contracting?
• Is there enough evidence to react now?
• What should my pricing or merchandising team investigate next?

The goal is not more scraped rows.

The goal is faster competitor decisions.

Key features

Competitor price monitoring

Detect meaningful competitor price increases and decreases and connect them with other observed commercial signals.

Stock monitoring

Track availability and stock-related changes across monitored pages.

Product and assortment monitoring

Identify changes in product mix, assortment and relevant commercial content.

Competitor move detection

Combine related observations instead of treating every page difference as an isolated event.

Likely intent

Generate an evidence-backed hypothesis about what an observed competitor move may mean commercially.

Counter-evidence

Show evidence that weakens the leading explanation so users can distinguish stronger signals from speculation.

Next-move prediction

Persist a hypothesis about what may happen next and evaluate it against later observations when sufficient history exists.

Recommended action

Return concise decision support for pricing, merchandising and competitive workflows.

Decision Alerts

Send sufficiently strong competitor signals to a webhook or Slack-compatible incoming webhook.

Historical calibration

When enough historical outcomes exist, later observations can confirm or weaken earlier predictions and contribute to an observed-precision profile.

Who is this for?

• Ecommerce teams — monitor competitors without manually checking product and category pages every day.
• Pricing teams — see competitor price moves together with the surrounding commercial evidence before deciding whether to react.
• Merchandising teams — track assortment, promotions and merchandising changes across competitors.
• Brands and retailers — watch launches, availability, promotions and category strategy.
• Agencies — monitor competitor activity for multiple client workflows.
• Competitive intelligence teams — turn public competitor website changes into structured decision signals.
• Automation and AI workflows — feed structured competitor events into dashboards, agents and downstream automations.

Quick start

1. Add one or more competitor domains. Direct URLs are optional.
2. Run the Actor. It automatically selects high-value commercial pages from each domain.
3. If a usable public historical capture is available, the Actor can compare it with the current page immediately.
4. Otherwise, the first successful run establishes the monitoring baseline.
5. Save the input as an Apify Task and schedule repeat runs.
6. Receive structured intelligence when meaningful commercial changes appear.

For alerts, add a webhook or Slack-compatible incoming webhook URL and configure the minimum alert confidence.

Input example

{
  "competitorDomains": ["example.com"],
  "urls": [],
  "monitorId": "competitor-a",
  "compareMode": "commerce",
  "outputMode": "all",
  "changeThreshold": 1,
  "maxPages": 10
}

Use a stable monitorId for recurring monitoring of the same competitor set.

Example output

The following is an illustrative price-change scenario, not a verified live customer result. Advanced intent, prediction and decision fields depend on sufficient supporting evidence.

{
  "status": "changed",
  "changeType": "price",
  "changeScore": 55,
  "prices": ["87.00"],
  "previousPrices": ["99.00"],
  "commercialEvent": {
    "eventType": "price_cut",
    "priceDeltaPercent": -12.12
  },
  "leadingHypothesis": null,
  "evidenceQuality": null,
  "prediction": null,
  "decision": null
}

A detected price change does not by itself prove a promotion or the competitor's intent. The Actor may return null for advanced analysis when there is not enough evidence. Repeat monitoring is needed to evaluate longer-term signals and predictions.

First run vs. later runs

First run: when a usable public historical snapshot is available, the Actor may show historical price or stock differences as context. An old archive comparison is not a recent competitor move and does not trigger a commercial event, intent hypothesis, prediction or urgent action. Without a suitable capture, the first successful run establishes a baseline.

Later runs: repeated runs can detect meaningful changes, connect related events over time, update hypotheses and evaluate earlier predictions against subsequent observations.

Decision Alerts

Configure decisionAlertWebhookUrl and minimumAlertConfidence to send qualified competitor events to a webhook or Slack-compatible incoming webhook.

An alert can include the observed competitor move, likely intent, confidence, supporting evidence, counter-evidence, prediction, opportunity and recommended response. Low-confidence events can be suppressed instead of being pushed as actionable alerts.

Automation and integrations

Use the Actor with Apify Tasks, scheduled runs, Apify API, webhooks, Make, Zapier, n8n, BI dashboards and AI agents.

For recurring monitoring, save the input as a Task and schedule it at the interval appropriate for your market. Use outputMode: changesOnly when downstream systems should receive only baselines, meaningful changes, intelligence events, calibration resolutions and errors.

Built for actionable competitor intelligence

A traditional scraper gives you data. A basic change monitor gives you differences.

Competitor Intent Intelligence is designed to help turn those differences into a commercial decision.

The real question is not only:

Did the competitor change something?

but:

Does this change matter, what might they be doing, and should we react?

Pricing

The Actor uses Apify Pay per Event pricing. See the current price displayed on the Apify Store for authoritative pricing.

Limitations

• The Actor monitors observable public website evidence.
• Commercial intent is inferred and is never presented as proven causation.
• Some websites may block automated requests.
• Some important content may be available only through JavaScript and may provide limited signals through the lightweight HTTP path.
• Historical calibration depends on events the monitor was able to observe.
• Small historical samples are treated as early evidence rather than definitive proof.
• Failures are reported per URL so one blocked page does not stop the entire run.

Start monitoring competitors

Add a competitor domain, run the Actor once, and schedule recurring checks. Use direct page URLs only when you want to force monitoring of a specific page.

Track the change. Understand the likely move. Decide what to do next.