As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly set up alerts for changes to your competitors.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, power-user skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a document or spreadsheet and list each competitor's name, main website, product pages, pricing pages, careers page, press page and public social or review pages.
   2. Paste that list and your preferred notification destination into the prompt, naming the changes that matter to your decisions rather than asking for every possible change.
   3. Open the recommended monitoring services and feeds yourself, create only the alerts that the response says are directly supported, and authorise each account connection on the service's own site.
   4. Use Rows to connect structured public data or feeds where its live data connections support them, and keep one row per competitor, source, alert name and last test date.
   5. Trigger a harmless test change where the source allows it, then compare the received notification with the alert name, source link, detected change and timing recorded in your spreadsheet.
   6. Ask the chatbot to revise rules that produce irrelevant results, and add an explicit limitation beside every source that cannot be monitored reliably.
   7. Set a recurring manual review of the listed competitor pages and compare your findings with the alerts before using the system for a strategy decision.

   Prompt

   Help me set up a reliable alert system for competitor changes. Competitors: [names and URLs]. Changes I care about: [for example, pricing, product pages, jobs, press coverage, partnerships, reviews and major website changes]. Notification destination: [email, spreadsheet or team channel]. Review frequency: [frequency]. Tools and accounts I already have: [list].
   
   First, separate the sources into changes that can be monitored directly, changes that need an RSS feed, newsletter, search alert or other service, and changes that cannot be monitored reliably. Do not claim that you have opened a page, connected an account or created an alert. Then produce a table with competitor, source URL, change type, monitoring method, setup steps, expected alert delay, likely false positives and a test method. Prefer simple, lawful sources and do not recommend bypassing access controls or monitoring private data.
   
   After the table, give me an exact numbered setup sequence for the tools I already have. Include alert names, search terms, filters and notification rules. Mark every item that needs my account authorisation. Finish with a maintenance checklist and a list of important changes this system may still miss.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.