Competitor signals — the evidence.
One row per rival, three honest tiers, and every post linking out so you can check it yourself. Plus the reason most thin briefs are thin: missing social handles.
This is the evidence half of the brief. Every claim the Verdict makes upstream is backed by a post you can click and read yourself. One row per competitor, always — the section is never blank, even when nobody moved.
The shape of the section
It's an accordion. Each tracked rival collapses to a single header line; the most important one is expanded when the page loads.
The collapsed header carries, left to right:
- Avatar — their logo, or the favicon from their website, or coloured initials.
- Name and a tier badge (see below).
- A one-line summary of what they did.
- Source glyphs — small platform marks for the channels this activity came from (up to four).
- A post count, and the chevron.
Rows are ordered by usefulness: fresh rivals first (busiest first), then rivals last seen a while ago, then the quiet ones. Above them all sits a roll-up line — “3 of 5 tracked rivals were active this week. 1 still needs channels connected.” — and a badge in the card header reading N active this week or Quiet week.
The three tiers
Every competitor lands in exactly one tier. The tier is about what we can honestly say, not about how good they are.
| Badge | Means | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| New — green | They published something in the last 7 days, and we know its real publish date. | An AI read of what it means, plus up to three of their recent posts. |
| Last seen — orange | Nothing fresh, but their most recent move is 30 days old or less. | Their last move and their latest blog post, so the row still tells you something. |
| Monitoring — grey | We have nothing at all, or their last move is over 30 days old. | An honest line — and, if the cause is missing handles, a button to fix it. |
The badge also shows the age: New · 2d ago, Last seen · 3w ago. Monitoring shows no age, because there's nothing to date.
Inside an expanded row
Expand a competitor and you get:
What it means
A short read of their activity. For a fresh competitor this is written by ScoutRival Intelligence from their actual posts. For a quieter one it's a plain, deterministic line — we don't invent analysis where there's nothing to analyse.
The post trail
Each row is [Source · when], the post's own words, an impact badge, and a link out. YouTube rows get a red Watch button; everything else gets an open-in-new-tab arrow. Nothing here is paraphrased away — you can always go and read the original.
Latest blog
For a Last seen or Monitoring rival, their most recent blog post is surfaced separately, at any age. It's often the most useful thing on a quiet competitor's row.
Impact scores
The number on each post is its impact, 0 to 100. It's a measure of how much the post landed, not of how clever it was.
- Social posts — scored from real engagement: likes, comments (weighted three times heavier), shares (five times), and views. The scale is logarithmic, so a post with 10,000 likes doesn't drown out everything else. Social posts land between 40 and 95.
- Blog posts — 40 to 80, with fresher posts scoring higher.
- Homepage / messaging changes — a flat 75. When a rival rewrites their headline, that's them repositioning, and it's worth your attention.
The badge colour follows the number: 70+ is red (this one mattered), 45–69 is orange, below that it's grey.
Baseline snapshots — the first capture we take of a competitor's homepage so we have something to compare against — score 0 and never appear as activity.
Honest dating — “captured” vs “posted”
“Captured 3h ago” does not mean “posted 3h ago.” It means we found it three hours ago. The post itself could be a month old.
Some platforms give us a post's real publish date. Some don't. When we have it, we show the true age — “2d ago”. When we don't, we show when we saw it, and we say so: “captured 3h ago”.
The distinction is enforced, not decorative:
- Only a real publish date can make a competitor “New”. An undated post can never borrow the scrape time and pretend to be fresh — which is exactly what a naive feed would do the first time it scraped a rival's five-year-old archive.
- The age on the tier badge uses the newest real publish date we hold, not the newest thing we happened to fetch.
So a rival you just added may show a stack of posts “captured just now” while still sitting on the Monitoring tier. That's correct: we've read their history, but we haven't seen them do anything lately.
The handles problem
A competitor with no LinkedIn, no Instagram and no blog URL on their record gives us nothing to check. So there's nothing to report, the row sits on Monitoring forever, and the brief above it thins out for want of evidence.
You'll know because the app tells you twice:
- An orange banner at the top of the brief counts the affected rivals.
- The rival's own row reads “We're connecting Acme's channels. Add their social handles to start tracking activity.” with an Add Acme's social handles → button under it.
Open Brand → Competitors, hit Edit on each one, and paste their profile URLs. It's five minutes of work and it is the highest-leverage thing you can do to your brief. What we monitor, and how often →
The other cause of a stubbornly quiet row is a dead link. After repeated failures we back off that source and warn you on the competitor's card. Fix the URL and monitoring resumes.
A genuinely quiet week
Sometimes the answer is just: nobody did anything. The section says so — “Quiet week across your 5 tracked rivals — a good window to lead the conversation instead of react.”
That's a real finding, and a useful one. A week where your whole category is silent is a week where whoever speaks first owns the narrative. The Verdict and Next Move above will still tell you what to do with it.