The 6 sources that actually matter.
- Twitter / X — what their founder is publicly thinking.
- LinkedIn — hiring signals, exec moves, big-customer announcements.
- Blog + changelog — official narrative, ships of substance.
- G2 reviews — both new wins and recent churn complaints.
- Reddit / Hacker News — unfiltered user reactions, often weeks before reviews catch up.
- Job posts — the most accurate roadmap any competitor publishes.
Why an agent (not a Google Alert).
Google Alerts dump unranked noise. The agent's job is to filter, rank, and summarize. For each competitor it answers three questions: what shipped, what's the sentiment shift, what's the implication for us. A 200-item raw feed becomes a 12-bullet digest.
The build.
Browse-based agent (Browse, Multi-On, or a self-hosted Playwright loop) hits each source on a schedule. Items go into a Notion staging DB. A Claude pass reads the week's items, deduplicates, and produces the digest in a fixed Slack format. Human review takes 5 minutes Friday morning before posting to #competitor-watch.
What teams actually do with it.
The digest becomes the agenda for a 15-minute Friday standup between marketing and product. Killer-feature copy, positioning shifts, and "we just heard X is hiring for Y" all get caught before sales runs into them blind.
The agent prompt, source list template, and Slack formatter ship in the weekly. See also: buyer signal guides.