| name | track-startup-competitors |
| description | Track startup competitors across public websites, pricing pages, product pages, changelogs, documentation, public X posts, GitHub organizations and repositories, package registries, search engines, news, public communities, review platforms, job listings, and web archives. Use when Codex needs to create a competitor baseline, compare historical snapshots, find recent market moves, monitor a watchlist, investigate one competitor, detect pricing or positioning changes, verify product launches, distinguish confirmed changes from rumors, or generate an evidence-linked Competitor Change Map with recommended responses. |
Track Startup Competitors
Build durable competitive intelligence from public evidence. Search broadly, conclude conservatively, and keep every observation, change, inference, and recommendation traceable to its source.
Language
- Conduct research, analysis, labels, exports, and reports in English.
- Preserve non-English source text separately from a labeled English translation.
- Never translate, paraphrase, or summarize a statement and present it as a verbatim quote.
Read the relevant references
- Read references/source-strategy.md before researching any competitor.
- Read references/identity-and-deduplication.md before resolving domains, handles, repositories, people, or duplicate coverage.
- Read references/evidence-and-confidence.md before classifying observations, changes, or inferences.
- Read references/impact-scoring.md before ranking changes or recommending a response.
- Read references/snapshot-schema.md before creating or updating a snapshot.
- Read references/report-schema.md before generating the analysis JSON or report.
- Read references/research-safety.md before accessing social, community, archived, blocked, or login-gated sources.
Choose the mode
baseline — Create the first verified snapshot. Never claim change detection without an earlier comparable snapshot.pulse — Find material activity within a stated window, normally 7 or 30 days.compare — Compare two saved snapshots and explain confirmed additions, removals, and modifications.deep-dive — Investigate one competitor across all accessible public source groups.market-shift — Find a pattern supported across multiple competitors without treating correlation as causation.watchlist — Refresh every competitor and produce a change map. Do not schedule recurring runs unless the user explicitly asks.
Run the workflow
1. Establish the watchlist
- Inspect the startup URL, supplied competitor list, previous snapshots, and existing research before asking questions.
- Record the startup's product, target segment, geography, business model, and decisions this research should inform.
- Resolve each competitor's canonical name, domain, public social handles, GitHub organization, product names, and known aliases.
- Keep direct competitors, adjacent alternatives, incumbents, and substitutes visibly separate.
- Ask only for missing context that materially changes the scan or response.
2. Create a source plan
- Search official product surfaces first, then code and release surfaces, search discovery, social and community sources, company signals, and archives.
- Allocate a bounded source budget per competitor. Prioritize material surfaces over exhaustive low-value crawling.
- Record every attempted source group as
available, partial, blocked, not_found, or not_applicable.
- Treat Google and other search results as discovery only. Open the underlying page before using it as evidence.
- If X, LinkedIn, a review site, or an archive is inaccessible, mark it unavailable. Never reconstruct missing content from snippets or memory.
3. Build an immutable evidence ledger
- Create one evidence item per source observation with a stable ID.
- Preserve source URL, source type, authority, competitor, captured time, published time when available, title, exact short excerpt, normalized observation, and access status.
- Separate facts from public opinions and from analyst interpretation.
- Prefer primary sources. Use secondary sources to discover or corroborate, not to overwrite official evidence.
- De-duplicate syndicated announcements, reposts, copied reviews, mirrored documentation, and the same claim repeated across pages.
4. Create or refresh the snapshot
- Represent every comparable fact as a stable signal key such as
pricing:pro:monthly, positioning:primary-audience, or github:api-sdk:latest-release.
- Store normalized values separately from display text.
- Cite the evidence IDs behind every signal.
- Preserve unknown values as
unknown; absence of evidence is not evidence of removal.
- Save the snapshot before interpreting it.
5. Detect changes deterministically
- When two snapshots exist, run:
node track-startup-competitors/scripts/compare_snapshots.mjs <previous.json> <current.json> <changes.json>
- Treat a signal as added, removed, or modified only when both snapshots had comparable source coverage.
- Downgrade or suppress changes caused by blocked pages, missing scans, reordered text, cookie banners, dates, counters, tracking parameters, or cosmetic markup.
- Never claim that a strategy changed solely because a page changed.
6. Corroborate and interpret
- Classify each item as
confirmed_change, corroborated_signal, unconfirmed_signal, community_reaction, or noise.
- Connect signals only when their timing, entity identity, and business meaning align.
- Label strategic interpretations explicitly as inferences.
- Look for counter-evidence and unchanged signals that weaken the interpretation.
- Distinguish what changed, why it may matter, and what remains unknown.
7. Score impact and choose a response
- Score relevance, magnitude, strategic proximity, commercial consequence, persistence, evidence strength, and urgency.
- Keep confidence separate from impact. A high-impact rumor remains low confidence.
- Place each change into
act, investigate, watch, or ignore.
- Recommend customer research, measurement, messaging changes, product work, or no action as appropriate.
- Never recommend copying a competitor merely because it launched something.
8. Create the deliverables
- Save snapshots as
competitor-radar/snapshots/<date>-<watchlist-slug>.json.
- Save the structured analysis as
outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-analysis.json.
- Generate the interactive report:
node track-startup-competitors/scripts/generate_report.mjs <analysis.json> <report.html>
- Export the evidence ledger:
node track-startup-competitors/scripts/export_evidence.mjs <analysis.json> <evidence.csv>
- Save the report as
outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-change-map.html.
- Save the ledger as
outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-evidence.csv.
- Create
outputs/<startup-slug>-response-brief.md when the analysis supports actionable responses.
- Return clickable absolute links to every artifact.
9. Verify before delivery
- Open the report and test search, filters, evidence links, responsive layout, and empty states.
- Confirm that every displayed change points to both old and new evidence when applicable.
- Confirm that every inference is labeled and includes counter-evidence or uncertainty.
- Confirm that blocked sources are shown as coverage gaps, not silently omitted.
- State the strongest confirmed move, the most important weak signal, the most dangerous uncertainty, and the next monitoring step.
Enforce research integrity
- Never bypass authentication, private accounts, paywalls, CAPTCHAs, robots restrictions, or access controls.
- Never invent a post, page, price, release, quote, date, handle, metric, or archived version.
- Never use a search-result snippet as final evidence.
- Never treat stars, followers, likes, hiring counts, or posting frequency as business success without support.
- Never treat a feature announcement as proof of availability, adoption, quality, or revenue impact.
- Never treat community sentiment as representative market research.
- Never infer a removal when the current source was blocked or not scanned.
- Prefer
INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE to a confident unsupported conclusion.
Default report order
- Executive market pulse
- Coverage and source health
- Material changes
- Market movement timeline
- Cross-competitor themes
- Act / Investigate / Watch / Ignore board
- Competitor profiles
- Uncertainty and counter-evidence
- Filterable evidence ledger
- Snapshot and methodology details
