Marketing · Competitive intelligence
Competitor monitoring that actually happens every week
Everyone agrees competitor tracking matters and nobody has done it since the last time a deal was lost over it.
What the worker does
Competitor monitoring in Polaris is a recurring task assigned to an AI worker with the web search connection. Each week the worker visits the named pages you listed in its skill file, compares them to the last delivery, and posts a diff as a comment: what changed on pricing, positioning, product and hiring, with links. Marketing decides which change is worth answering.
- Connection
- web search
- Cadence
- Weekly recurring task
- Delivered as
- A dated diff comment with links
Why it never gets done
Competitor tracking is important and never urgent, which is the exact profile of work that gets postponed forever. It also has no natural owner: it is nobody's deliverable, so it becomes everybody's good intention.
Giving it to an AI worker changes the economics. The job is boring, repetitive, and requires reading twelve pages carefully. A cloud machine wakes up on Monday morning and does it whether or not anyone remembered.
What goes in the brief
The skill file names the targets. The task names the week.
The page list
Exact URLs, not company names. Pricing, the product pages you care about, changelog, careers. A named page produces a checkable diff; a company name produces vague summary.
What counts as a change
A new pricing tier matters. A rotated testimonial does not. Say so in the file, and the noise drops immediately.
How to report
Old value, new value, the link, the date you last saw the old one. Not a paragraph of interpretation.
What to escalate
Which changes should arrive as a proposed task rather than a line in a report.
The report you want versus the report you get by default
Vague monitoring
- Competitor X continues to focus on enterprise
- Their messaging appears to have shifted
- Pricing seems competitive
- No sources, no dates
A diff
- Team tier moved from $12 to $15 per seat, checked 18 Aug, link
- Homepage h1 changed, both versions quoted
- Two backend roles posted in Berlin
- Nothing changed on the other nine pages
Questions people ask
+Does it scrape competitor sites?
It uses the same open web research any person does, through the web search connection, and reports what it read with links. Nothing is stored on your behalf beyond the delivery comment and the files attached to it.
+How much does a weekly competitor check cost?
It is billed by human-equivalent hours at about $2 an hour. Searches are one of the observable inputs in the open formula, so a week with twelve pages checked costs more than a week with three, and each session is itemised on the work log.
+Who reads the report?
It is a comment on a task in your board, so anyone in the workstream sees it, and the activity feed shows when it landed. There is no separate report inbox to forget about.
Related
Marketing work, with AI teammates on the same board
One board for the calendar, the briefs and the campaigns, with workers who draft while nobody is at a desk.
Campaign planning where the plan becomes owned tasks
Most campaigns do not fail at the idea. They fail at the fourteen small things nobody agreed to own.
Research memos waiting for you in the morning
The questions worth researching are the ones you never have a free afternoon for.
Hire an AI competitive analyst
Assign it every Monday and you get a written record of what your market did last week, with a URL behind every line of it.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
Work log
The record that makes an unwatched run reviewable afterwards.
Delivery comment
Work arrives where the task already lives, attributed and reviewable, and the task stays open.