Competitor monitoring beyond FollowThatPage for SEO teams

Plenty of SEO and marketing people first tried FollowThatPage competitor monitoring years ago: drop a rival's pricing page into the form, wait for the email. It is free and takes a minute. It also tends to produce one of two outcomes. Either the inbox fills with diffs about rotating testimonials and cookie text, or the emails stop because the page now loads its content with JavaScript. This guide covers what to watch on competitor sites, why plain text diffs struggle with it, and how to set it up in AyeWatch instead.

What is worth watching on a competitor's site

Not every page earns a monitor. For search and marketing teams, these tend to pay off:

• Pricing pages. Plan names, prices, limits and which features sit on which tier.
• Comparison and "vs" pages. What a rival says about you, and which claims they add or drop.
• Landing pages for your shared keywords. Headline, offer and calls to action.
• Changelogs and release notes. New features you will be compared against.
• Careers pages. New roles often hint at new products or markets.
• Docs and help center index pages. New sections can signal a feature before the announcement.

Why text diffs struggle on modern marketing pages

Follow That Page converts each page to plain text and emails the lines that were added or removed. Two parts of that design work against competitor tracking.

First, it does not execute JavaScript. Its FAQ says so directly, and argues that content belongs in plain HTML. Many marketing sites disagree and render pricing tables, plan toggles or testimonials with scripts, so the robot may see a shell of the page.

Second, every text change counts. A/B tests, rotating logos, review counts and "updated" dates all register as changes. Follow That Page has line and block filters to cut that noise, but they are keyword based. When a rival renames "Starter" to "Basic", a filter that kept only lines containing "Starter" goes quiet at the exact moment something interesting happened.

Setting it up as rules instead

AyeWatch uses a sentence in place of filters. For a competitor's site, one monitor can hold several URLs under one rule. A typical setup:

Pages: the rival's pricing page, its comparison page against you, and its changelog.

Rule: "Alert me when a plan, price, plan limit or comparison claim changes, or a new feature is announced. Ignore design changes, testimonials and dates."

When something matches, the alert says what changed in a sentence or two, for example that the middle plan's price went up or that a new row appeared in the comparison table. Nothing fires for a reshuffled hero image.

A second monitor for landing pages might read: "Tell me when the headline, main offer or call to action changes on these pages."

Watching beyond the site

Competitor moves do not only happen on their domain. AyeWatch topic monitors follow a subject across more than a billion sources, including news sites, blogs, forums and government pages. Social monitors cover X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, so you can pick a competitor's X profile or a subreddit where your category is discussed. Follow That Page is built for single URLs and does not try to cover this.

Getting alerts to the right people

Follow That Page sends email, nothing else. AyeWatch shows every alert in the feed and sends push to its iOS and Android apps on every plan. Paid plans add email, a daily digest email, Slack, Discord and webhooks, chosen per monitor. A common pattern is pricing alerts to a sales channel and landing page alerts to the content team.

Cost and cadence

AyeWatch Pro costs $9 a month and monitors hourly; Pro+ at $19 adds ASAP mode for launches you need to hear about quickly. Checks spend monitoring credits, most at one credit each, and the app estimates daily usage when you set an interval. Auto mode speeds up checks while a page is changing and slows down when it is quiet, which suits pages that sit still for months and then change all at once.

When a different tool fits better

If you need pixel-level proof of how a competitor's page looked on a given day, a screenshot tool like Visualping is the better record, since it compares pages visually. And if the page is plain HTML and you just want to know that something changed, Follow That Page is still free.

For tracking what competitors actually changed, across their site and the wider web, AyeWatch is the stronger setup. The Free Preview gives three monitoring runs on up to three topics, no card, which is enough to point it at one rival and judge the alerts yourself. More options are compared in AyeWatch's guide to FollowThatPage alternatives.