Finding & adding your competitors.
AI discovery, the suggestions strip, and the Add form. The one thing that decides whether a rival ever shows activity: the links you put on their record.
A competitor in ScoutRival isn't a name on a list — it's a set of links we check every day. Which is why the two things that matter on this tab are who you add and what links you put on them. A rival with no profiles attached will sit in your brief showing nothing, forever.
AI discovery
The Discover with AI button runs one call against your brand — your hostname, your industry, your About — and asks for four to six real competitors, ranked by how likely a buyer of yours is to seriously evaluate them.
What happens next is the part that matters:
- Every suggested URL is probed to check it actually resolves. A site that answers gains confidence; a site that doesn't loses it. This is what stops us handing you invented companies.
- Results are deduplicated by domain, and your own domain is dropped.
- The top six by confidence are kept. Six, not fifteen — a short list you'll actually review beats a long one you won't.
- Discovery is free. It costs no credits, and you can re-run it.
It aims for quality over volume, so a niche or local business may come back with three or four rather than six. That's the intended behaviour, not a failure.
Why discovery is locked at first
On a brand-new brand, the Let ScoutRival find them card shows a padlock and a link back to the Voice tab. Discovery unlocks once you've reached the Voice step in the setup chain.
This is deliberate. Discovery is only as good as the context you give it — run it against a brand with no industry, no About and no voice and it will hand you competitors from an adjacent market. Fill in the first three tabs and it has a real lens to work with. You can always add competitors by hand in the meantime; that's never gated.
The suggestions strip
Discovered rivals land in a card above your list: Competitors we found for you. Each one shows a name, its domain, and a confidence badge — a number from 0 to 100:
- 80 and up (green) — a head-to-head rival. Same offer, same buyer.
- 60 to 79 (orange) — adjacent. Your customer might pick them instead of you.
- Under 60 (grey) — a long shot. Read it before you accept it.
The top three are pre-ticked, and Select top 5 ticks the best five in one click. Accept converts the ticked ones into tracked competitors; the ✕ on any card dismisses it for good.
When you accept a suggestion we immediately read its homepage and fill in what we find — a description, its social links, and its blog or news page. So an accepted rival usually arrives ready to watch rather than blank. Usually — a slow or bot-blocking site leaves the fields empty, and then you'll need to add the links yourself.
Adding one by hand
Add competitor opens a modal. In order:
Paste their website URL
Tab out of the field and we fetch the page in the background, then auto-fill the business name, a short description and any social links we can find in their header or footer. It never overwrites something you already typed.
Check the name and description
The name is required. The description is optional, up to 600 characters — a line on how they position themselves is enough.
Add their social profiles
Up to 5, from nine platforms. This is the single most important thing in the modal — it's what decides whether this rival ever shows any activity in your brief.
Point us at their blog
Paste their blog or news page, or hit Auto-detect and we'll hunt for it on their site. Blog tracking is free to run and often the richest signal a rival gives off — it's where the positioning changes show up first.
Add the founder's LinkedIn, if there is one
In small businesses the founder's personal profile is usually louder than the company page. Adding it gives us a second, separate LinkedIn feed to watch.
Every competitor card has Edit and Delete, so you can go back and add links you missed. If a card is showing the hint "No LinkedIn tracked yet", that's exactly what it's telling you to do.
The Monitoring scope chips
The Monitoring scope chips at the bottom of the modal — and the Sources toggles on the competitor detail page — do not currently change what gets scraped. They're stored, and they're ignored by the scraper.
What we actually watch is decided by which links are on the competitor's record: their social profiles, their blog URL, and their founder's LinkedIn. To stop us watching a channel, remove the link. To start, add it. What we monitor, and how often →
We'd rather tell you plainly than have you spend twenty minutes toggling chips that change nothing.
Limits and what a competitor costs
The badge in the page header reads N / limit tracked — how many rivals you're watching against your plan's allowance. When you hit the cap the Add button greys out and points you at pricing.
On credits:
- The first 5 competitors on a brand are free.
- Adding a 6th or beyond through the Add form costs 5 credits each. If your balance is short, the form tells you before it creates anything.
- Discovery itself is free — running it, re-running it, and dismissing suggestions all cost nothing.
Note that the ongoing watching is billed separately, as part of your daily brief — roughly 2 credits per social platform scanned and 2 per competitor blog fetched. Which means your daily burn scales with competitors × platforms. What a brief costs →
Save & Complete
Once you've got at least one competitor, a Save & Complete footer appears. It's the last step of brand setup: it marks all four tabs done, and it kicks off your Brand Engine build in the background — the pass that works out what your market actually searches for. That takes a couple of minutes, runs while you're doing something else, and costs nothing. More on the engine →
You can keep adding rivals afterwards. Setup being "complete" doesn't lock anything.