Why You Shouldn’t Track Your Competitors
Strange advice from someone who builds a competitor tracking tool. Here is the honest version.
I build a competitor tracking tool, and I think most people track the wrong competitors.
Not badly. Wrongly.
The subject you pick decides what you learn. And the company next door is usually the least interesting name on your list.
Four kinds of subject
When you decide who to watch, you are really choosing what kind of answer you want back.
- Your rival is defensive. It confirms what you already suspected.
- Faster growers are mechanical. They show you a machine that is provably working.
- Agenda setters are directional. They give you the argument before the market has adopted it.
- Adjacent categories are generative. They show you solutions built under constraints you do not share.
Most watch lists are the first row, four times over.
What watching a rival is actually good for
Defence. And defence is worth something.
You want to know the week their price drops, the week a new tier appears, the week they start bidding on your brand name. That is real, it is time sensitive, and missing it is expensive.
What it is not good for is ideas.
A direct competitor works under your constraints. Same buyers, same margins, same suppliers, roughly the same cost of acquisition. Their solutions are shaped by the same walls as yours.
So watching them closely tends to confirm what you already believed. It feels like insight. It produces nothing you were not already going to do.
And there is a cost. A company that watches only its rival ends up reacting on their schedule, in their vocabulary, in the comparison they chose. That is not a strategy. It is an echo with a dashboard attached.
A real example, with the numbers
Here is what that looks like in our own data, from a run on 28 September 2026 across 70 brands.
Say you sell earplugs, and you watch the category leader, Loop Earplugs.
You will learn that Loop is running 6,989 active Meta ads. You knew they outspend you. Now you know it to the ad. Useful for defence. Not one new idea.
Now look outside the category. Huel sells meal shakes, not earplugs. Nobody shopping for earplugs is comparing you to Huel.
In the same run:
- Huel had 61 comparison pages. Loop had 5.
- Huel’s organic traffic grew 22.9% month on month. Loop’s fell 7.2%.
- Huel was running 1,254 active Meta ads. Loop was running more than five times as many.
Watching Loop would never have shown you this, because it is exactly the thing Loop does not do.
Now the honest part, because I would rather you hear it from me.
This is not proof that comparison pages cause growth. Across all 70 brands, comparison pages barely move with organic growth (a correlation of 0.03). They move more with domain rating (0.32) and with traffic from AI assistants (0.28). One month of growth at one company is a lead, not a law.
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But a lead is exactly what a watch list is for. You would not have found this one by watching the company you already know best.
Watch whoever is growing faster than both of you
The most useful subject is rarely a competitor. It is a company growing faster than you and faster than your rival, in any category at all.
Growth is a mechanism, and mechanisms travel. A company that turns buyers into publishers, or makes onboarding sell the upgrade, has solved a problem that is not specific to what it sells.
You cannot copy their product. You can read their machine.
Fast growers are also forced to be readable. They publish more, hire visibly, change the pricing page and test in the open, because they have to move. There is simply more to read.
Watch the people setting the agenda
Every category has a handful of companies and people whose language everyone else ends up using later.
Following them is not fandom. It is an early read on vocabulary.
When the words start moving, the search results, the comparison sets and the price expectations tend to move with them. Whoever notices first gets the uncontested term. Whoever notices last spends years explaining why they are different from a description they did not choose.
Different input, not better copying
Copy inside your category and your buyer can see it. They have both tabs open. Your claim is their claim in a different typeface, and you have volunteered to be judged in a comparison somebody else framed.
Borrow a mechanism from a category your buyer does not shop in, and it arrives as original. Same idea, no comparison, no second place.
A comparison page built the way a meal shake brand builds them does not read as copying on an earplug site. Nobody in your market has the reference.
So: copy volume from anyone. Take direction only from people solving a different problem than you.
Keep exactly one rival on the list
This is not an argument for ignoring the competition. It is an argument about proportion.
Keep one direct rival, watched for price, packaging and anything that needs a same-week answer.
Pick everyone else for what they can teach you:
- two or three companies growing faster than your category,
- one that sets the agenda,
- one from a neighbouring market with different economics.
That list produces material. A list of five rivals produces anxiety and a slightly better sense of where you already stand.
How to choose a subject
- Are they growing faster than you? If not, whatever they are doing is at best neutral evidence.
- Do they operate in the open? A company that publishes, advertises and hires visibly can be read. A quiet one gives you a blank page, however closely you watch.
- Is their motion similar and their market different? That is the sweet spot. The mechanism transfers, and the copying is invisible because your buyer never sees the source.
- Would you be embarrassed to be caught copying them? If yes, they are a competitor. If nobody would even connect the two, you have found a good subject.
Try it on one name
If you want to see what a single subject gives you, start a free benchmark at https://kvasano.com/start.html. One domain, measured against yours. No card, no call.
Pick the one you would be least embarrassed to copy. Start a free benchmark at https://kvasano.com/start.html.
This piece first appeared on kvasano.com.
