Daily
Know when a competitor changes their pricing
Keep competitor pages in a sheet. When one changes, Slack tells you what's different.
- Runs
- Daily
- Apps
- Google Sheets, Slack
- AI
- Optional
- Access
- Sheets read+write; Slack chat:write
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every day, check the competitor pages listed in my Competitors sheet. If one has changed since yesterday, post what changed to #competitors and note the date in the sheet.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A marketing manager lists a dozen competitor pages in a sheet: pricing tables, plan comparison pages, review profiles and key landing pages. A competitor quietly raises its entry plan by $10, or rewrites its headline to attack a feature she has just launched. She learns about it from a sales call two weeks later, when a prospect mentions the new price and she has no idea since when it has been that way.
Once a day, ClickRuntime reads the page addresses from your sheet, fetches each one and takes a fingerprint of the section you care about, such as the pricing table. If it differs from the value stored last time, it posts the change in Slack and logs a row. When AI is used, it also explains the change in plain words.
Product marketers, founders and SEO teams use it as an early warning on competitors.
What you get out of it
Price changes are noticed within a day
Knowing a competitor raised or cut a plan lets you adjust a campaign, update a comparison page or brief sales before the next prospect asks. The delay between a change and your reaction becomes hours.
You see the exact change
The diff shows which words or numbers changed, not just that something moved. That saves staring at two screenshots trying to spot which line has a new price. Nobody needs to compare screenshots or memory.
A dated history of competitor positioning
Each logged row records when a page changed, which builds a timeline of how rivals reposition over months. It is useful evidence when planning messaging or explaining market shifts to leadership.
No more manual page checking
Visiting a dozen competitor pages every week is boring, so it gets skipped. A daily check that only speaks up when something is different covers it with no attention required.
Changes are explained, not just flagged
When AI summarizes the difference, the alert says something like starter plan up from $19 to $29 and annual discount removed. Readers understand the impact straight away, without opening the page.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every day, ClickRuntime reads the competitor names and page addresses from the Competitors tab of your Google Sheet.
It fetches each page and compares its text with the copy saved from the last check.
When a page has changed, a message appears in your #competitors Slack channel with the competitor, the page and the lines that are different.
The change is also logged in the sheet, and the new copy is saved for the next check.
Before it runs live
- Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use
- Connect Slack, then invite the app to the channel (type /invite @ClickRuntime there)
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
- Add another app, for example also send it to Gmail
- Combine it with other Google Sheets and Slack steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
import hashlib
from datetime import date
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, notify
SHEET_ID = "your-spreadsheet-id"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
sheets = build("sheets", "v4", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False)
rows = sheets.spreadsheets().values().get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Competitors!A2:B").execute().get("values", [])
pages = state.get("pages") or {}
changed = 0
for i, row in enumerate(rows, start=2):
name, url = (row + ["", ""])[:2]
text = BeautifulSoup(http.get(url).text, "html.parser").get_text(" ", strip=True)[:20000]
digest = hashlib.sha256(text.encode()).hexdigest()
old = pages.get(url)
if old and old["hash"] != digest:
added = [w for w in set(text.split(". ")) - set(old["text"].split(". "))][:5]
notify.slack(f"๐ {name} changed {url}\n" + "\n".join(f"+ {s[:200]}" for s in added), channel="#competitors")
sheets.spreadsheets().values().update(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range=f"Competitors!C{i}",
valueInputOption="RAW", body={"values": [[date.today().isoformat()]]}).execute()
changed += 1
pages[url] = {"hash": digest, "text": text[:5000]}
state.set("pages", pages)
return {"checked": len(rows), "changed": changed}FAQ
Common questions
Does it detect changes in only part of a page?
Can it monitor pages that load content with JavaScript?
Is it legal to monitor competitor websites?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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