Competitor monitoring usually means reading their news, keeping an eye on their social media and checking their website now and then. That last part rarely happens systematically. Yet a competitor often publishes new pages, drops a product line or rewrites a section without any announcement. For anyone deciding on markets, countries and positioning, that is an early signal. GripIQ already tracks those websites. What fewer people know: for each change, you can also see exactly which pages were added, changed or removed. That feature sits in the Competitors timeline, and it is easy to overlook.

What GripIQ keeps track of

GripIQ tracks a website via its sitemap: the list of pages the site itself publishes. With every scan, the platform compares that list with the previous snapshot. In the Competitors timeline, you then see that something has changed, with a short summary of the gist of the change.

Such a summary is handy, but it leaves one question open: what exactly has changed? Three new pages about a new product are something quite different from three hundred pages that got a new URL after a migration. You only see that difference when you look at the pages themselves.

What the detail view shows

If you click a website change in the Competitors timeline, for example via View changes, a window opens with the pages the change affected. They are spread over three tabs:

  • New: pages that appear in the sitemap for the first time;
  • Changed: pages for which the sitemap reports a more recent modification date;
  • Removed: pages that have disappeared from the sitemap.

At the top, you see a short summary and, where available, labels showing the type of content that changed. With a date picker, you go back to earlier scans of the same website.

You can search each list and filter it by section, for example everything under "/locations". Good to know: the search works on a page's address, not on the text on it. So you only find a product or country name if it appears in the URL. If a list is very long, GripIQ shows the most recently updated pages and tells you how many there are in total.

The share changed, on the card

On the card itself, a bar shows how much of the website the change affected, with a line such as "231 of 1,840 pages changed ยท 13%". Those figures help you gauge the weight of a change before you dive into it. A change of 2 percent calls for a different response from a change affecting a third of the website, even if the summaries look alike.

Two details make the figure more reliable:

  • Removed pages count towards the total. That way, a big clean-up doesn't look bigger than it is.
  • The first snapshot of a website you have just started tracking shows no percentage. At that point, every page counts as new, and a percentage of a hundred would say nothing.

That last point is useful to know when you have just started tracking an extra competitor. If you see no percentage with the first change, nothing is wrong: there is simply nothing to compare with yet.

Competitor monitoring: how to read a change as a strategist

The share changed and the list of pages answer two different questions. The percentage tells you how big the intervention was. The list tells you where it took place. Together, they give a first idea of the intention behind the change. That does remain an interpretation. GripIQ shows which pages the sitemap reports as new, changed or removed, but not why, nor what changed on the page itself. For the content, you open the page, and you test your hunch against a second source before you build a decision on it.

A few ways to read a change:

  • Many new pages in one section. The competitor is investing in a theme, a country or a target group. Check whether it concerns a new market or a new offering.
  • Many removed pages. The competitor is pulling out of a product line or a language, or simply tidying up. Because removed pages count towards the total, that figure helps you tell the difference.
  • A low percentage with one notable page. That could be a new pricing page, or a rewritten positioning. Via the list and the section filter, you find that page quickly.
  • A high percentage without new content. A technical restructuring can affect a large part of the website without anything strategic happening. Open a few pages to see whether their content is new.

An example

Say you track the website of an important competitor. A new change appears in the timeline, summarised as new pages added around a service. The bar shows that 13 percent of the website was affected, and you open the New tab. You filter on the section with your countries, or search for the country code in the address. If there are new pages among them, the competitor is probably expanding its offering for that market. Whether they announce it too, you will only see later in other sources.

Want to set that signal against other sources? Read Competitor analysis: the model, an example and what AI answers add. And why such signals tell you more together than each on its own is explained in What is market intelligence, and how does it differ from business intelligence?.

What you can do now

  • Open the Competitors timeline and look at the latest change from your main competitor.
  • Click View changes and filter the list on the section or market you need to make a decision about.
  • Note the share changed and the most important pages, and compare them with the next change.

Open GripIQ and go to Competitors.