How to Set Up a Weekly Competitor Watch With AI

Most owners check competitors the same way: a quick look at their site when something reminds them, then nothing for two months. Changes that matter, such as a new product line, a new offer on the homepage or a new page targeting your customers, get noticed late or not at all.

A weekly watch fixes that with very little effort. Grok Bot visits the same short list of pages every Monday, compares them with last week, and leaves you a note in chat about what changed. Here is how to set one up.

The running example is hypothetical: a small online candle shop keeping an eye on three competitors.

Step 1: Choose the pages, not the whole site

Watching an entire site produces noise. Pick the pages where a change would make you act:

The homepage (the headline and the main offer)
The pricing, shipping or bundles page
One or two best-selling product or category pages
The blog or news page

For the candle shop, that is about five pages per competitor, fifteen in total. Start there. You can add pages later once you see which ones actually change.

Step 2: Say what counts as a change

Left alone, a comparison flags every date stamp and rotating banner. Give Grok Bot a plain-language rule for what matters, for example:

A new or removed product, collection or service
A changed price, discount, bundle or free-shipping threshold
A new headline or main offer on the homepage
A new blog post or landing page

And what to ignore: cookie banners, review counts that tick up, footer dates, and wording tweaks that do not change the meaning.

Step 3: Let it keep last week's copy

A comparison needs something to compare against. On the first run, Grok Bot saves a plain-text copy of each page in its own workspace. On each run after that, it reads the page again, compares it with the saved copy, reports the differences that match your rule, and saves the new version for next week.

The first week's note is just a baseline: here is what each page says today. The useful notes start in week two.

Step 4: Check the sitemap for new pages

A competitor's new pages often show up in their sitemap before anyone links to them. The sitemap protocol defines a list of a site's URLs, each with an optional lastmod date that is meant to be the date the page was last modified, not the date the sitemap was generated.

Ask Grok Bot to read each competitor's sitemap every week and list URLs that were not there last week. For the candle shop, a new URL with "wholesale" or "gift-sets" in it is worth a look. Treat lastmod as a hint: it is optional, and not every site keeps it accurate.

Step 5: Look back when you need history

Sometimes you want to know when something changed before you started watching. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine keeps captures of many public pages, which you can browse by URL and date. Its help page notes that some sites are missing, for example when they were blocked by robots.txt or password protected, and that there is a lag of 3 to 10 hours between a crawl and the capture appearing. Ask Grok Bot to pull an older capture of a page when the history matters, and accept that some pages will not have one.

Step 6: Add what they post on X

Website changes are only half the picture. Competitors often announce a launch or a sale on X before the site catches up. X's search operators include from:, which matches posts from a specific account, and url:, which matches posts that link to a given address. A search for posts from each competitor, plus posts that link to their domain, shows both what they said and what others shared about them.

If you already follow what is trending in your niche, add these accounts to that list rather than starting a second one.

Step 7: Decide what the Monday note looks like

Keep it short enough to read in two minutes:

Changes that match your rule, grouped by competitor, each with a link to the page
New URLs from the sitemaps
Notable posts on X
One line: "Anything here worth a response?"

Grok Bot runs this as a scheduled routine, so the note is waiting in chat on Monday morning. If nothing changed, the note should say so in one line. A quiet week is a useful answer.

When a change needs action, such as a competitor lowering a free-shipping threshold, Grok Bot can draft a message to your team or a note for your next planning meeting. It does not send anything on its own; you read it and decide.

Limits

Grok Bot only reads public pages, the same ones any visitor sees. It does not log in to competitor accounts, and it should not be pointed at anything behind a login. Pages that build their content with heavy scripts may not read cleanly, and a redesign can make everything look changed for one week. When a change looks significant, open the page yourself before acting on it.

Setting up routines like this is part of our embedded AI partnership. If you want help choosing the pages and rules for your market, book a free session and we will build the first version with you.

Related service: embedded AI partnership.

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How to set up a weekly competitor and website watch with an AI assistant