How I research competitors.

Most competitive research studies competitors the way a museum studies paintings. One visit, one impression, filed away. But positioning moves, and what I want to know is rarely what a competitor says today. I want to know what they changed since last quarter, because change is strategy leaking in public.

So the method is a diff.

The spreadsheet has one row per competitor and one column per quarter. In each cell, the same few things copied verbatim: the homepage headline, the first three items in the product nav, the pricing tiers, who the newest case study is about. Verbatim matters. Paraphrase it and you destroy the evidence.

Once a quarter, one afternoon. Fill the new column, put it next to the old one, and take a highlighter to whatever moved. A headline that swapped "teams" for "enterprises" is a move upmarket. A pricing tier that quietly vanished. "AI" migrating from the feature list up into the headline. Any single snapshot tells you almost nothing. The change tells you what their last board meeting was about.

The highlighter's other job is discipline, because sometimes nothing gets highlighted, and that is a finding too. A competitor whose copy hasn't moved in a year is either very sure of itself or very stuck. Both are worth knowing before your next roadmap conversation.

No dashboards. Monitoring tools promise alerts, alerts arrive daily, and daily alerts train you to ignore them. A spreadsheet you visit quarterly, and actually read, beats a feed you scroll past every morning.