I built a bot to watch a competitor. It became my idea source.

A teammate once sent me a competitor’s article and asked if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. It was already live, already ranking, and I was the content person who was supposed to know first. Nothing broke. But that small sting stayed with me all day, and it’s the reason I built the thing I’m about to describe.

What keeping an eye on competitors really looked like

My competitor monitoring was a browser tab I opened when I remembered to, and a few saved searches I checked on slow afternoons.

I told myself I was watching the space. But what I was really doing was trusting my luck and my memory to catch things, and both of those turned out to be terrible at their job. The morning my teammate scooped me on my own beat, I stopped pretending the tab-and-hope method was working.

I didn’t want to spend 1 hour a day reading a competitor’s blog. That’s a poor use of my attention, and it puts me in a reactive, slightly anxious headspace I don’t like working from. What I wanted was smaller and more specific: an automation that tells me when something lands.

So, here’s what I did.

How I automated competitor content monitoring

The flow is like this: connect the competitor’s content feed to a system that checks each new post and messages you when something matters. Mine runs on Make.com and lands in Slack, so the watching happens without me.

Get Yevheniia’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

Let me walk through the actual chain:

1. The competitor’s RSS feed. Their blog publishes an RSS feed. Every time they publish, a new item shows up. I set this monitoring trigger to run every hour.
2. A first pass with Claude. Claude reads the new post and makes a quick judgment. Is this a real content piece or a product note? Is it in a topic I care about? It also pulls out what’s worth searching for.
3. A text parser to clean up the handoff. Claude answers in plain language, and the next step needs one clean value. So a pattern match extracts the search query from Claude’s response and passes it along. It’s a small connective step, and the chain breaks without it.
4. A context check with a search call. An HTTP request sends that query to Serper, which returns Google results as data. I use it to see how the piece sits in search: what it’s ranking for, and what else is already on the page for that topic.
5. A second pass with Claude. Claude takes the post plus the search context and writes me a short summary. What they published and why it might matter to me, with a suggested next step.
6. A Slack message. All of that arrives as a message in a channel I keep for this. I read it and decide if it’s worth my attention.

That’s the entire system.

What the alerts gave me

The automation turned into an idea source, which was never the plan:

• It became a source of what to write next. Watching one competitor closely showed me formats I’d talked myself out of trying. It also made the empty space between us obvious: the topics neither of us had touched. That whitespace points you somewhere original.
• It surfaced updates hiding in my own back catalog. A competitor published a fresh take on something I’d covered 2 years ago, and it reminded me my version was overdue. Half my update ideas now start as an alert that sends me back to reread an old post with clearer eyes.

How to make competitor monitoring worth it

If you build something like this, or even if you keep doing it by hand, here’s what made the difference for me.

Watch for what they’re not covering. Anyone can see what a competitor published. The opportunity is in the topics sitting untouched between you and them.

Let a machine do the watching. Once the watching runs on its own, your attention is free for the part only you can do, which is deciding what it means.

Filter hard, or you’ll drown. An alert for every post trains you to ignore alerts. I’d rather miss a minor piece than get pinged 5 times a day and start tuning it out. Build in a step that judges relevance before anything reaches you.

Reread your own work when they publish. A competitor covering your topic again is a free audit. It tells you which of your pieces are due for a refresh, without you going looking for them.

Built to keep up, ended up ahead

I was building this because I was embarrassed about being the last to know. That was the whole initial motivation, and it wasn’t a very ambitious one.

But somewhere along the way it became the same system that hands me ideas and gaps I could use. So instead of a tool to stop falling behind, it turned into one of the things that helps me get ahead.