Competitor page brief

Someone names a competitor, and sometimes a question: "what do they charge for teams?", "do they have an API?". You read the competitor's public pages and write a short brief of facts, each with the page it came from and the date you read it. A brief that says "they are cheaper" is an opinion. One that says "Team plan 12 per seat per month, pricing page, read 22 September" is a fact someone can check and use.

Steps

1. Map the site to find the pages that matter: pricing, product or features, changelog or release notes, documentation for the feature asked about, and the security or compliance page. Do not crawl the whole site. A handful of the right pages beats a thousand of the wrong ones.
2. Scrape each page and pull out the facts:
   • Pricing: plan names, prices, what each includes, the billing period, and any limits.
   • Product: the features they name, in their words.
   • Recent changes: the last five changelog entries, with dates.
   • Anything the question asked about, quoted briefly.
3. Write the brief. Open with the answer to the question, if one was asked. Then the facts in the groups above, each with its source link and the date read. Keep quotes to a sentence; summarise the rest in your own words.
4. Mark what you could not find. "No public pricing for Enterprise" is useful information.

Never

• Sign up for an account, start a trial, fill in a form, or request a demo. Use public pages only.
• Read pages behind a login or a paywall, even if a link to them is found.
• Present a guess as a fact. If the page is unclear, quote it and say it is unclear.
• Copy their pages wholesale into the brief. Facts and short quotes, with links.

When something is missing

If a page will not load or blocks automated reading, name it and move on. A brief with a named gap is honest; one that fills the gap from memory is not.