Free tool

What did your competitors change this week?

Name up to three of their pages. Once a week you get an email listing what changed on each one, in plain text: the lines that appeared, the lines that disappeared, the title if it moved. No dashboard, no analysis, no login. It is the one input to your weekly review that you cannot get from your own numbers.

Start a watch

Coming soon

This one is built and is not switched on yet. It goes live shortly, and when it does it will be free and ungated like the rest of them, with no sign-up and nothing stored.

In the meantime the written version of the habit this feeds is the weekly review: thirty minutes, six questions, one of them about competitors.

How it works

You name up to three pages

A pricing page, a services page, a home page. Public pages only, and only ones you could open in a browser yourself.

You confirm the address

One email with a link. Until it is opened nothing is watched and nothing else is sent; an unconfirmed request is deleted after 48 hours.

The first snapshot is taken

Within the hour. The visible text of each page, split into lines, is stored so there is something to compare against.

Once a week, the diff

The lines that appeared and the lines that disappeared on each page since last week, and the title if it changed. Unchanged is reported as unchanged.

What it is not

It does not analyse

No summary, no opinion, no model. You read the changed lines and decide what they mean, which takes about a minute in the weekly review.

It does not crawl

It reads the exact pages you gave it, once a week, and follows no links. It reads robots.txt first and skips a page that asks not to be read.

It does not see everything

Visible text only. A new photo, a design change, a script, a price rendered by JavaScript after load: none of that shows up, and the digest says so.

It does not keep history

One snapshot per page, overwritten each week. There is no archive to browse and no data to sell, because there is no data.

Why a diff and not a report

Most competitor tracking fails the same way: it produces a report, the report is long, and nobody reads it. A diff is short by construction. If nothing changed, the email is two lines. If a competitor rewrote their pricing page, the email is the new lines and the old lines, and you can tell in a minute whether it matters. That is exactly the size of thing that fits into a thirty-minute weekly review, which is where this is meant to be read.

It also means there is nothing to get wrong. There is no model in the path, so nothing is summarised, inferred or invented. What you receive is what the page now says that it did not say last week, and only that.

What we do with the data, stated plainly

This is the only tool on the site that stores anything, so here is the whole list: your address, the pages, the schedule, and one text snapshot per page. An unconfirmed sign-up lives 48 hours. A confirmed watch lives six months and then stops unless you renew it. Unsubscribing deletes all of it at once. It is used for nothing else, it is not joined to anything else, and the digest never carries an offer. The retention rules are written into the code that runs the tool, not into a policy page that the code could drift away from.

On the other side, this reads other people's public pages, so it behaves like a good visitor: it says who it is, it reads robots.txt first, it never follows a link, and a site that asks not to be read is not read. Details on that, including how to block it, are in the FAQ below.

What to do with what it tells you

Usually nothing, and that is fine: the value is knowing rather than reacting. Occasionally it is the prompt for a decision: a competitor started listing hours you do not, added a service you already offer but never mention, or changed how they describe the thing you both sell. If the change is about how fast they answer, run the speed-to-lead calculator on your own numbers first. If it is about what their site says in the first four seconds, run the website test on your own page before you worry about theirs. If you run several locations, the digest is worth watching from head office rather than nine branches each guessing, which is the argument on the multi location page.

The companion guide

The thirty-minute weekly review that makes every system you own worth having

Where this applies

AI systems for operators whose nine locations give nine different answers

AI systems for shops that do not have a website problem, they have a phone problem

AI systems for automotive businesses that quote faster, follow up instantly and never lose a lead to voicemail

Competitor watch FAQ

What exactly do you store, and for how long?
Your email address, the up-to-three page addresses, the dates of the last and next digest, and one text snapshot per page so next week has something to compare against. An unconfirmed sign-up is deleted after 48 hours. A confirmed watch runs for six months, then stops unless you click to keep it going, and unsubscribing deletes all of it immediately. There is no history, no analytics on what you watch and no log of who watched what.
Will you email me anything other than the digest?
No. One confirmation, then one digest a week, and both are the information you asked for plus an unsubscribe link. There is no newsletter behind this, no follow-up sequence and no pitch inside the digest. That is deliberate: the moment a promotion is added the email stops being something you asked for.
Is watching a competitor’s public page allowed?
Reading a public page once a week is what a browser does when you visit it, and that is all this does. It identifies itself honestly, obeys robots.txt, never follows links and never reads anything the page does not show a visitor. If a site owner asks not to be read by this tool, we add them to a deny list and every watch on their pages stops, and the digest tells the subscriber why.
I run a site and I do not want this tool reading it.
Two ways, both honoured. Add a rule for the user agent AutomatikCompetitorWatch to your robots.txt and it stops on the next run. Or email hello@useautomatik.com with the domain and we add it to the deny list by hand, which also blocks new sign-ups for that domain. Either takes effect within a week, usually within the hour.
Why only three pages?
Because it is a digest for an owner, not a monitoring product for an analyst. Three pages a week is enough to notice a price change, a new service, a changed offer, or hours that moved, and small enough that the weekly email gets read rather than filed. If you want more than that, you want a different tool.
The digest said a page could not be read. What does that mean?
Usually one of three things: the site blocks unfamiliar visitors, the page took longer than six seconds to answer, or its robots.txt disallows this reader. In every case the last snapshot is kept, so the next week that succeeds compares against it and nothing is lost. If it keeps happening on the same page, that page is not watchable by this method and you should drop it.
Can I change the pages I watch?
Sign up again with the same email and the new list. You get a fresh confirmation link; until you open it the old list keeps running, and when you do the list is swapped and the snapshots for pages you dropped are deleted.