Sales intelligence
- Battlecards and win-loss notes, written to close a deal.
Competitor monitoring for PR
Competitor monitoring for PR means watching where your rivals get press and who writes it, so you can take your own place in the same conversations.
It is reading the public record of a market with a pitch in mind.
Illustration
What the tools charge to watch rivals
- 150free checks a month on Visualping, enough for five pages checked about once a dayvisualping.io
- 0public price lists at Crayon and Klue, both quote after a democrayon.co
What is competitor monitoring in PR
Sales teams use competitive intelligence to win deals, and PR reads the same public signals for a different goal.
A rival's new feature is big news for sales and noise for PR.
PR monitoring
- Which reporters care about this market, which angles ran, which nobody has told yet. A rival's founder quoted by a reporter who has never heard of you is a lead.
What should you track about a competitor
Each signal answers one PR question, and anything that answers none can be dropped.
When an assistant names a rival, open the page it cites. That page is your next pitch target.
- Press releases and wire posts. What story are they telling this month.
- Bylined articles. Which reporters cover this space, and from what angle.
- New sites linking to them. Reviews and lists you could also be on.
- Founder posts on LinkedIn. Which topics their spokesperson claims.
- Podcast and YouTube appearances. Which hosts invite your category.
- Reddit and forum threads. What buyers praise or complain about.
- AI answers. Where assistants name them and not you.
How often to check on rivals
Daily for what is new, weekly for what it means. The daily pass is one card per competitor, only if something happened.
Once a week coverage counts are set against the week before, and the same pass produces the journalists of the week.
Once a month the buyer questions go back to the AI assistants.
How to find the journalists who cover your competitors
Take every bylined story from the last seven days that names a competitor, keep the reporters who have not written about you in a year, and sort by how often they cover the category.
For each one, write down the angle and what the story missed.
The missing part is where your pitch starts, and the list doubles as a starter media list.
Illustration
Copy and send
What a weekly competitor note should say
The useful output is five lines a founder can read on a phone, ending with one action for the week and its owner.
An illustrative note.
Rival A was quoted twice this month by the same trade reporter, both times on clinic backup power. Neither piece had outage data. You have six months of it. Send the reporter a three-line note with the chart and no ask. Rival B's new partner page is now cited by Perplexity for the question on best storage for small hospitals. Action this week. [one action], owner [name]
Who are my competitors
Start with the rivals your buyers mention, then widen the list, because the one that matters for PR is longer.
Give each name a reason and have a person check the top ten, because automated overlap also catches suppliers and publishers.
The free find my competitors check runs all three methods on your domain.
- Search overlap. Sites ranking for many of your searches.
- AI co-mentions. Companies the assistants list beside you or in your place.
- Category peers. Companies that share referring sites with the leaders. Drop directories and media sites from this list.
How to monitor competitors for free
A free kit covers the daily layer if someone has fifteen minutes each morning.
It will not tell you which reporter is new to the beat or what the week meant.
That needs a person with a list and a habit.
- Create a Google Alert for each rival name in quotes.
- Follow each rival's newsroom and each founder on LinkedIn.
- Put their pricing and product pages into a free page-change tracker.
- Search Reddit for each name once a week.
Competitor monitoring tools compared
These tools split by who buys them.
Media suites such as Meltwater list journalists, while a PR team using a sales platform such as Klue or Crayon still has to work out who wrote what and what to pitch next.
Competitive intelligence
- Examples Crayon, Klue
- Built for sales battlecards, win-loss
- Price model quote after a demo
Page-change trackers
- Examples Visualping
- Built for a rival's pricing page
- Price model free, paid from $14 a month
SEO suites
- Examples Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking
- Built for keyword and backlink overlap
- Price model monthly subscription
Media monitoring
- Examples Brand24, Mention, Meltwater
- Built for news and social mentions
- Price model see media monitoring
How much does competitor monitoring cost
The data is the cheap part and the reading is what you pay for.
At Pocket PR rival tracking comes with media monitoring in the Growth plan, from $890 a month, reading included.
- Free kit. Alerts and a page tracker, $0 and 15 minutes each morning.
- Reading. About 1 hour of a specialist's time per company each week.
Is competitor monitoring legal
Generally yes, when you track public business information such as coverage, product pages and prices.
Personal data needs more care, even when it is public.
Fair game
- Public coverage, and reporters' contacts from their own published work.
Off limits
- Scraped personal data, private groups under a false name, posing as a buyer.
For EU companies
- Public data about named people still falls under GDPR. You need a legal basis such as legitimate interest, and you must tell people how their data is used.
A rival watch in three passes
One card per rival each morning
Every morning each competitor with news gets one card with the story and its reporter. New links to their site and their CEO's posts go on the same card.
Journalists of the week
On Sunday we list reporters who wrote about a rival and not about you, with the angle they used, so your next pitch lands on a warm beat.
One action on Monday
A five-line note from a PR specialist says what the week meant and names one next step, such as a reporter to brief or a page to fix.
One trade reporter, two rival quotes
A rival quoted twice by the same reporter
- Situation
- A fictional energy storage startup saw its main competitor quoted twice in three weeks by one trade reporter covering clinic backup power.
- What we do
- The Monday note flagged the reporter and pointed out that neither story had data on outage hours in clinics. The startup had that data from its own units.
- Outcome
- The startup sent the reporter a short data note with no ask, and was quoted in the next piece on the beat.
Illustrative example, not a client result
Anastasiia Bratkova
Chief Brand, Marketing & Communications Officer, RSE
Signs every pitch
Questions
What founders ask about watching rivals
What is competitor monitoring?
It is tracking what your competitors publish and what is published about them. For PR the point is to learn which reporters cover them before those stories shape your market.
How do I find out who my competitors are?
Look at three lists. Sites that rank for the same searches as you, brands AI assistants name next to you or instead of you, and companies your buyers compare you with in reviews.
How can I monitor competitors for free?
Set a Google Alert for each rival name in quotes and put their pricing page into a free page-change tracker. Following their CEO on LinkedIn covers most of what is left.
How many competitors should I track?
Three to five. More than that and the daily digest turns into a newsletter nobody reads.
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