What’s a competitor move you discovered too late that actually affected your business?

I used to think we were “keeping an eye on things”
but in reality it was more like checking every couple of weeks to see what competitors were doing :/

Meanwhile they were:

• tweaking pricing
• changing messaging
• adding features

We’d only notice much later...

It always felt like we were reacting instead of actually staying on top of things.

Lately I’ve been trying a different approach...setting up a few simple monitors on key pages and getting alerts when something changes, based on a prompt I define (using monity ai for this).

It’s pretty low effort, but gives a much clearer picture of what’s happening without constantly checking.

Curious how others handle this?

Do you actively track competitors, or just check in from time to time?
If so, what was the biggest change you discovered that actually affected your business?