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Every marketing team has started competitor monitoring at least once. A spreadsheet of competitors, a few alerts, the promise to look at their websites every month. Three months later, nobody opens the spreadsheet any more. It is not a lack of discipline: reading dozens of sources to find two useful facts is thankless work, and it always comes after the urgent.
Collecting is the part a workflow does best. It does not get bored, it does not skip a week. This article is part of the n8n workflows: what each department can automate series, marketing section.
In short
You choose few sources, but the right ones, and you write them down.
The workflow spots what has changed, not everything that exists.
A short weekly summary replaces reading the sources.
Important changes (prices, a new offer) go out as an immediate alert.
The team judges and decides; the workflow recommends nothing.
Choose your sources before automating
Automated monitoring that follows everything is no better than abandoned monitoring: it buries the team under a flow it ends up ignoring. The groundwork is to choose, for each competitor, the two or three sources that really say something.
- Offer and pricing pages.
A change of price or plan is the most useful signal.
- The blog or news page.
For launches and announcements.
- Job ads.
A competitor hiring salespeople in a region is preparing a push.
- Public reviews.
What their customers complain about is what your salespeople can highlight.
Many of these sources publish an RSS feed. The n8n documentation describes the RSS feed trigger, which flags each new article as soon as it is published. For pages without a feed, the workflow reads the page at regular intervals and compares it with the previous version.
Spot what changes, not what exists
A week of monitoring in n8n
- Collecting
Every day, the workflow reads the chosen sources.
- Comparing
It keeps what is new or changed since the last reading.
- Summarising
A language model condenses the week’s changes.
- Sending
The team receives one page, with links to the sources.
The summary is where AI helps: it reads a two-thousand-word blog post and pulls out the three sentences that matter. But it sometimes gets things wrong, and it does not know your market. So each line of the summary keeps its link to the source, so you can check before acting. A price change detected on a page goes out as an immediate alert, without waiting for the summary, because it is the information salespeople need to react to quickly.
What monitoring must not do
What monitoring covers
Reading public pages, at a reasonable pace
Summarising public announcements and reviews
Flagging a change to the team
What it does not cover
Getting round a login or restricted access
Copying a competitor’s content wholesale
Deciding a price change on its own
Monitoring covers what is public. It respects the terms of the sites it reads and does not overload their servers. And it remains a decision aid. A competitor cutting prices does not mean you should cut yours: it is information, which sales management weighs against what it knows about its margins and its customers.
From summary to action
Monitoring is only worth something if it changes something. The weekly summary works better when it ends with a simple question to the team: “What do we do with this?”. The answer, even “nothing”, is noted. After a few months, you know which sources actually fed a decision, and you drop the others.
Monitoring also feeds the rest of marketing: salespeople’s arguments, article topics, the themes of a webinar or a trade show. The article Marketing automation for SMEs: with or without AI puts monitoring back among all the marketing tasks you can equip.
To build monitoring that lasts, with your competitors and your sources, our n8n automation offer starts with the list of decisions the monitoring should inform.
Frequently asked questions
How many competitors should you follow?
Few: three to five direct competitors, the ones your salespeople meet in sales meetings. Beyond that, the summary gets longer and loses its value. You can add a “to watch” category for new entrants, with a single source each. The list is reviewed every quarter, based on what salespeople hear in the field.
Is the AI summary reliable?
It is useful to save time, not to skip checking. The model can misread an announcement or invent a detail. That is why each line of the summary points to its source. Before any decision, someone reads the source again. The summary tells you what to read; it does not replace reading.
Can you follow competitors’ social networks?
Partly. Some platforms offer official access to a page’s public posts, others restrict it heavily. The workflow uses what the platform allows and leaves the rest. For many companies, websites, job ads and reviews say what matters, without depending on the changing rules of social networks.
Sources
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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