Most B2B teams either track no competitors or try to track too many. Here’s a 3-tier framework you can build in 90 minutes — direct, adjacent, peripheral.
I recently sat down with Charles Woodin on the Geekdom Podcast, and he brought up a question I've heard a lot: How many competitors should you be tracking? What about adjacent competitors who do part of what you do, but not everything.
That got me thinking. There are two ways most B2B teams handle competitive tracking, and they both end the same way.
The first is to track nobody. You’re too busy shipping. You assume you’ll hear about big competitor moves through “the grapevine.” Six months later you’re in a deal where the prospect is comparing your pricing to a competitor you didn’t even know had launched a self-serve tier.
The second is to track everybody. You open a Notion page with 25 competitors. You set up Google Alerts for each one. By week three, your inbox has 400 unread Google Alert digests, half your “competitors” are companies with the same name that make completely unrelated products, and the whole exercise has quietly collapsed.
Both failure modes have the same root cause: you’re treating every competitor as equally important. They’re not. The fix is to stop doing that.
Build the watchlist as three separate groups, each with its own cadence for how often you look at it and its own depth for what you actually check.
Daily check-ins. Full coverage. These are the names that show up in your sales deals.
You’re watching everything: news, social posts (company and exec accounts), Terms of Service edits, pricing page changes, hiring spikes, paid ad creative, review trends, navigation changes on the marketing site. If they breathe, you want to know.
The cap is critical. More than five direct competitors and you’re not really watching any of them — you’re sampling. If your gut tells you you have eight direct competitors, you probably have three direct competitors and five Tier 2s. Be honest.
Weekly check-ins. Lighter coverage. These are the products that sit one step over from yours — different category, partly overlapping job-to-be-done, occasionally surface in deals as “the way we do it today.”
You’re watching the major moves only: funding rounds, big product launches, pricing changes, named partnership news, public ICP shifts. You don’t need to know every LinkedIn post their CEO writes. You need to know if they’re starting to point their product at your customer.
Monthly check-ins. Surface-level only. The question you’re asking once a month is: “Are any of these creeping into our lane?”
This is where you put fast-growing startups in adjacent spaces, well-funded players in nearby categories, and the legacy giant whose new VP of Product just announced they’re “modernizing the platform.” You don’t need real-time alerts on these. You need a once-a-month sweep that flags meaningful trajectory shifts.
When you’re not sure where a competitor belongs, run them through this:
Scoring: Tier 1 if (1) is yes. Tier 2 if (1) is no but (2) and (3) or (4) are yes. Tier 3 if just (3) or (4) are yes. Everyone else stays off the list.
That last point matters. Most teams’ watchlists are bloated because they treat “any company that could theoretically compete with us someday” as a tracking obligation. It isn’t. If a company doesn’t clear at least one of these four questions, they belong on a quarterly review at most — not on your daily, weekly, or monthly watchlist.
A watchlist isn’t a fixed asset. It’s a queue.
The most common failure mode I see, after the initial setup, is that teams build the watchlist once and then never touch it again. A year later, two of their “Tier 1” competitors don’t exist anymore, three of their Tier 3 entries should have been Tier 1 six months ago, and the whole thing is silently lying to them.
The rule:
Block 30 minutes on the first Monday of every month to do the shuffle. It will save you from being blindsided.
You can run this framework with no software. Google Alerts (set narrow, with negative keywords to filter out same-name false positives), Visualping on the homepage and pricing page of each Tier 1, a Notion board for the watchlist itself, and a recurring Friday calendar block to actually look at the results. That’s enough to get you most of the value at zero cost.
The catch: the moment you have more than three or four Tier 1 competitors, this stops scaling. The diff between “the homepage changed” and “this is the change that matters” is the work. The reason teams stop doing manual CI isn’t the gathering — it’s the interpretation. There’s just too much to read.
That’s the part a real CI tool solves. KeepTabz (full disclosure: my company) was built specifically to make this framework operational at scale. The daily, weekly, and monthly cadence is baked into the product. Every signal is scored for strategic importance. The daily digest delivers the three things that actually matter to your Slack — instead of 400 alerts you’ll never open.
But the framework itself works whether you use a tool or not. Build the watchlist first. Adopt the tool when the manual version stops keeping up.
Here’s how to build the whole thing from scratch this week. Block 90 minutes on Friday afternoon. Bring a coffee. Open a fresh Notion doc.
Total setup time: 90 minutes. Total ongoing cost: 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes a week, 75 minutes a month. That’s it.
The point of competitive tracking isn’t to know everything. It’s to never be surprised. You don’t need to read every LinkedIn post your competitor’s CEO writes. You need to know when their pricing changes, when their ICP shifts, when their hiring page tells you they’re going upmarket. A tiered watchlist gets you that with a fraction of the attention.
The companies that win in 2026 aren’t the ones who track the most competitors. They’re the ones who track the right ones — at the right depth, at the right cadence, with the right framework for promoting the threats and demoting the noise.
Build the list. Work the cadence. Reshuffle every month. That’s the whole game.
