Competitor watchlists & change intelligence
A one-off competitor snapshot is out of date the week you take it.
A one-off competitor snapshot is out of date the week you take it. Watchlists turn that snapshot into a standing watch: DatIQ re-reads the pages you care about on a cadence, works out what actually changed, and tells you only when the change is worth your attention.
Open Watchlists from the top bar.
Setting one up
- New watchlist — name it, describe what you are watching for, and add the competitor domains.
- Choose a cadence — how often DatIQ re-reads them.
- Choose what to track: pricing, product and feature claims, positioning and messaging, leadership, or
customer proof.
The first run is always a baseline. It never alerts — there is nothing to compare it against yet, and a tool that fires an alert the moment you set it up teaches you to ignore its alerts.
Pages you added, and pages we suggested
You do not have to know a competitor's site map to watch it usefully. When you add a domain, DatIQ reads its homepage and suggests the pages worth monitoring — pricing, product, customers, and so on.
Suggested pages are labelled as such and kept visibly separate from the ones you added yourself, so opening a watchlist never shows you pages you did not choose with no way to tell which were which. Removing a suggestion is removing a suggestion; it does not undo a decision you made.
This distinction is not cosmetic: every monitored page is a recurring crawl on your allowance, so being able to see what was added automatically — and prune it — is how you keep control of what a watchlist costs.
Materiality — why you are not woken up for a copyright year
Every detected change is classified by how much it matters, and the classification drives what happens next:
| Materiality | Examples | What DatIQ does |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | A price changes, a tier is added or removed, a plan is discontinued. | Alerts immediately. |
| High | A headline feature claim changes, positioning shifts. | Rolled into the daily digest. |
| Medium | Supporting copy, a new case study, a page reorganised. | Rolled into the weekly digest. |
| Low | Whitespace, a copyright year, a rotated testimonial. | Recorded, never alerted. |
| Unknown | DatIQ cannot tell how much it matters. | Sent to review rather than guessed at. |
One rule is worth stating on its own, because getting it wrong is expensive:
A field that stopped being observed is not a deletion. If a pricing table was there last week and is
unreadable today, the overwhelmingly likely cause is a failed page render, not a competitor removing their
pricing. DatIQ reports it as unobserved. "They deleted all their pricing" is the costliest false positive
in this whole product, and it is not one we will hand you.
Facts and interpretation stay separate
A change record has two halves that never blend into each other. The fact is what changed — the old value, the new value, the page, the timestamp. The interpretation is what DatIQ thinks it means strategically, and it is always labelled as an AI reading rather than an observation. You can mark an interpretation useful or wrong, and that feedback is kept with the record.
The reason for the split is simple: you may need to take the fact into a pricing meeting. A fact is defensible. An interpretation is a starting point for a conversation.
Where changes go
Changes appear in the watchlist's own feed, and — if you want them elsewhere — get routed by the rules in §13 to Slack, email, a webhook, or your CRM.
Plan note. A watchlist is a recurring monitor, so it uses your plan's scheduled-monitoring allowance
(see §18). Plans without scheduled monitoring do not include watchlists.