What does a Competitors agent do? (And why your neighbour no longer has to draw the short straw)

In this article: what a Competitors agent does exactly, which 4 signals it gathers for you every morning, and how in a single week you genuinely know how your market is moving — without trawling through ten websites and LinkedIn pages every evening yourself.

The problem every small business owner knows

The scenario is familiar. A customer calls on a Friday: "How come [competitor X] can be so cheap now?" You don't know the answer. You open their website, scroll through their prices, and see that there's been a promotion running for three weeks that you completely missed. Three weeks — in which you could have responded. But you didn't notice, because monitoring your market isn't part of your day. It's an evening chore that always gets pushed back.

The other scenario, just as painful: a good freelance marketer delivers you a 40-slide "market analysis" report once a quarter. It sits on your desk, you skim it diagonally, and the recommendations no longer fit by the time you want to pick them up three weeks later — because the market has already changed again.

Tracking competition in SME land is either too late, or too slow, or too expensive. An agent that does it continuously solves all three at once.

What exactly is a Competitors agent?

A Competitors agent is software that does three things at once:

1. Tracks your 3 to 8 most important competitors — you choose them, or it suggests them based on your industry and SEO overlap. You can always adjust them.
2. Looks at four types of signal every night — prices, search engine rankings, social activity and press (PR, job postings, press releases).
3. Tells you in the morning what matters — not "there are 47 changes", but "these 3 things I'd discuss today: A, B and C, and here's why".

The difference with a traditional report: a report is after the fact. An agent works continuously, and filters out the noise before it reaches you.

The 4 signals it watches for you

1. Price and promotion moves

On your competitors' product or service pages, it scans every night for:

• Price decreases or increases on comparable products/services
• New packages or bundles (especially handy with subscription models)
• Promotional banners popping up (Black Friday before you'd even thought of it)
• "From €..." prices that you can't always see without requesting a quote

Concrete example: an installation company in Utrecht missed for three months that their biggest rival was offering heat pumps €890 cheaper. By the time they discovered it through a lost quote, the Competitors agent could have warned them about it the week after. One dashboard line: "Competitor X lowered its Daikin Altherma package yesterday from €7,490 → €6,600. Impact: very likely within your segment."

2. SEO and search engine moves

Four times a week it connects to your SEO tools (DataForSEO, Search Console, Ahrefs or similar) and looks at:

• Which keywords your competitors have just won (you at position 4 → them at position 2)
• Which new pages they've published (and which keywords those target)
• Which domains have started placing backlinks to them (an early indicator of a PR campaign)
• Their fastest-growing landing pages — that's where their marketing budget is shifting to

The key point: this tells you not just what they did, but what they're going to do. A rival that suddenly gains 11 backlinks from trade publications is almost certainly launching something new within 4-8 weeks.

3. Social activity and what's responding to it

LinkedIn, Instagram and possibly Facebook or TikTok, depending on your market:

• Frequency: how often they post (and whether there's an acceleration)
• Engagement: which posts get 5× more responses than average — that's where their winning message is
• Job postings: a rival hiring 3 salespeople in one month is on a growth push
• New hires: hired a head of marketing? Expect a rebrand within 2-3 quarters

4. Press and PR

Press releases, trade publications, podcasts your competitors appear in. Plus reviews on Trustpilot, Google and industry-specific platforms. Concrete signals:

• Review volume suddenly rising (a campaign or an incident)
• Review tone tipping from mostly positive to mixed (an opening for you)
• Press mentions in outlets you'd like to land yourself

What does your morning look like with a Competitors agent?

No 40-slide report. No alerts disturbing you every 5 minutes. One overview, once a day — just like the other Magic Monday agents:

"Good morning Elio — yesterday in your competitive field: 3 moves that matter to you. Competitor A lowered its entry price by 12%. Competitor B published a new landing page on 'bike rental Veluwe' (a keyword where you sit at position 6). A trade publication names competitor C as the 'fastest-growing player in 2026' — the first mention of that label. Here's what I'd do today…"

The agent gives a concrete follow-up action per signal: call customers with contracts about to expire, write a supporting article on the won keyword, request a press mention from a journalist. One click = have it done by a Marketing partner or the Content agent, or pick it up yourself.

Who is a Competitors agent worthwhile for?

The biggest payoff for:

• SMEs in competition-sensitive markets — hospitality, retail, installation companies, service providers with ≥ 3 direct rivals that are active online.
• Businesses with > €500K revenue where price cuts or market shifts are immediately visible in margin.
• Business owners who currently have a marketing agency or intern "googling what the competition is doing" — that involves a lot of wasted hours.

Do you have no real direct competitors (a unique niche, no price pressure)? Then the agent runs on a lower setting. Do you sell mainly on relationships and reputation, without much online share in the buying cycle? Then you'll get less out of it than average.

What sets this agent apart from a tool like SEMrush or Similarweb?

Tools show you data: a dashboard full of graphs, rankings and KPIs. Good tools — but you have to interpret it yourself, every week, in time you don't have.

The Competitors agent is a layer on top. It combines the data from those tools with your own context (your keywords, your margins, your market) and hands you the recommendation you'd otherwise have to puzzle out of the graphs yourself. No extra licence, no extra dashboard. One morning overview.

SEMrush is a telescope. A Competitors agent is a navigator who looks through the telescope and says: steer 5° to port.

How do you start?

The Competitors agent is ready on MagicMonday among the other 20 agents. For each agent you see a sample conversation — what you could ask it, and which 3 moves it would already have spotted this week in your market.

Tip: start with the agent where you feel the biggest blind spot today. For most small business owners that's either competitors, or SEO, or leads. If you're thinking right now "I honestly don't know what they're doing" — then this is your starting point.