The 8 things a competitive intelligence dashboard should track (and which tools actually track them)

"We track our competitors" can mean almost anything, from a spreadsheet someone updates before board meetings to a real-time feed across a dozen source types. Here's the fuller list of what's actually worth tracking, and where most tools, including ours, still have gaps.

The 8 things

• Pricing changes. The most commonly tracked signal, and still the one that trips up the most tools, because pricing pages are exactly the pages most likely to sit behind bot protection.
• Hiring activity. Job postings are a leading indicator: a competitor hiring for enterprise sales roles is telling you where they're headed before it shows up anywhere else.
• Press and funding. News mentions and funding rounds, useful less for the event itself and more for what it signals about runway and momentum.
• Product and positioning changes. Homepage messaging, new feature announcements, and repositioning, distinct from pricing and usually the hardest to track well since there's no single page that reliably surfaces it.
• SEO and traffic trends. Whether a competitor's organic visibility is growing or shrinking, an important context signal that's expensive to source accurately and is where a lot of tools quietly stub in placeholder or estimated numbers.
• Review sentiment. What's actually said about a competitor on G2, Capterra, or similar sites, not just that reviews exist.
• Win/loss reasons against that specific competitor. Not general market sentiment, but why deals you actually competed for were won or lost.
• An activity or momentum index. A single read on whether a competitor is speeding up or slowing down overall, built from the other signals rather than tracked independently.

Where the gaps usually are

Pricing, hiring, and press are the easiest to build and the most commonly covered. Win/loss reasons and an honest momentum read are rarer, because they both require more than scraping a public page: win/loss needs your own CRM data, and a momentum score needs a defined methodology, not just a vibe. We wrote up exactly how ours works in how we score competitor momentum, including which of these eight inputs we actually average into it today and which one we deliberately leave out until the underlying data is real.

What to actually ask a vendor

Not "do you track pricing," almost everyone says yes. Ask which of these eight they track with a real, described methodology versus which ones are marketing copy on a features page. The gap between those two answers is usually where the real cost of the tool lives, whether that cost is a much higher price tier or your own team's judgment filling in what the tool doesn't actually cover.