What we monitor, and how often.
The sources we watch on each competitor, the once-a-day cadence, what happens when a link dies — and the single setting that decides whether a rival shows activity at all.
ScoutRival watches your rivals so you don't have to open fifteen tabs every morning. This page explains exactly what gets watched, how often, and why a competitor sometimes goes quiet.
What we actually watch
For each competitor, we can track:
- Their blog / news page — via RSS where it exists, and by watching the page itself where it doesn't
- Their homepage — we notice when the messaging changes
- LinkedIn — the company page, and the founder's personal profile if you add it
- Instagram, X, Facebook
- YouTube — free, and checked twice as often as everything else
You'll find a Monitoring scope chip picker in the competitor form, and a Sources toggle on the competitor detail page. Right now neither one changes what gets scraped. What we actually watch is decided purely by which links are on the competitor's record — their social profiles, their blog URL, and their founder's LinkedIn. If you want us to stop watching a channel, remove the link. We're cleaning this up.
Handles decide everything
This is the number one cause of a brief that feels empty.
A competitor with no social links attached has nothing for us to check. They'll sit in your brief on the Monitoring tier with the note “we're connecting their channels”, and they'll stay there until you add a link.
If several rivals are in this state, you'll see an orange banner across the top of your Daily Brief telling you how many. Click through, hit Edit on each, and paste their LinkedIn and Instagram at minimum. Two minutes of work, and the next scan fills in.
Paste the competitor's website URL into the Add form and we'll try to find their socials and blog automatically. Use Auto-detect next to the blog field to hunt for their news page.
How often we check
Once a day per competitor, per source. YouTube gets checked twice a day because it's free to us.
That's a floor, not a setting — we won't scrape a source more than once every 24 hours, no matter how often you ask. This is deliberate. Social scraping is the one part of ScoutRival with a real per-call cost, and an uncapped scraper is how you wake up to a bill that isn't yours.
The practical effect: a rival's “latest post” may be a day old when it reaches you. That's why your brief reads the last seven days of activity rather than the last twenty-four hours — with once-a-day checks, a strict 24-hour window would call almost every day a quiet one.
When a link goes dead
Sites move. Profiles get renamed. Rather than retrying a dead URL forever, we back off:
- 1 failure → we wait a day before trying again
- 2 failures → we wait three days
- 3 or more → we wait a week
A single success clears the counter completely.
From the second consecutive failure, an amber warning appears on that competitor's card: “Couldn't reach this competitor's LinkedIn page on recent runs — check the link.” That's your cue. Open Edit, fix the URL, and the next run picks it straight back up.
We wait for the second failure on purpose — one blip is usually the other site having a bad afternoon, and nagging you about it would be noise.
Impact scores
Every signal carries an impact score from 0 to 100 — how much you should care.
- 70 and up (red) — a homepage rewrite, a positioning change, something worth reading today
- 45 to 69 (orange) — a real post, worth a glance
- Under 45 (grey) — routine activity
A competitor changing their homepage messaging always scores high. It's the clearest tell that a rival has changed their pitch — and the thing you're least likely to notice on your own.
Forcing a refresh
Refresh signals on the Daily Brief runs the scan right now instead of waiting for tonight. It drops the 24-hour floor to a short cooldown — but it doesn't remove the daily spend cap, so on a busy day it may find nothing new to fetch. It takes 20–40 seconds and reports how many new signals it found.
What monitoring costs
Scraping is billed with your daily brief, not separately:
- 2 credits per social platform successfully scanned
- 2 credits per competitor blog fetched
The important consequence: your scrape cost scales with competitors × platforms. Seven rivals with four platforms each is a much bigger daily bill than three rivals with two. If your credit burn is higher than you expected, that ratio is usually why.
Anything skipped because it's inside the 24-hour window costs nothing — so regenerating your brief twice in one day never re-charges you for scraping. More on what a brief costs →