How-to: Track a competitor
The Research surface is where you keep a roster of competitor URLs you want to benchmark against. This walks through adding a competitor, running an audit, and linking it to a project so the audit feeds the project’s competitive context.
Competitor records are org-level — every project in your org sees the same roster, no duplicate audits, no duplicate quota. Add “Acme Cloud” once and reference it from as many projects as you want.
1. Open the Research surface
Click Research in the sidebar. You’ll see your existing competitor list (or an empty state if this is your first competitor). If Research isn’t in your sidebar, the backend flag is off for your instance.
2. Add the competitor
Click + Add competitor. Two fields:
- URL — the competitor’s primary landing or product page. PlumPMM stores one row per
(org, url); if a teammate has already added this URL, you’ll see the existing record rather than a duplicate. - Label (optional) — a friendlier name. “Acme Cloud” reads better than the raw URL in audit lists and project workspaces.
Click Add. The competitor is recorded but not yet audited — adding costs nothing.
3. Run the audit
Click Run audit on the new competitor row. PlumPMM scrapes the URL and runs the same 13-dimension audit you’d get on your own pages. Wait 20–40 seconds. Cost: 1 audit-unit.
The competitor row now shows the latest overall rating; click in to see the full per- dimension breakdown.
4. Re-audit when the competitor relaunches
Click Run audit again any time. Older runs aren’t deleted — they stack up so you can see the competitor’s own positioning drift over time. Each re-audit costs 1 audit-unit.
5. Link the competitor to a project (optional but recommended)
Linking is what makes the competitor visible in a specific project’s workspace.
- Open the project workspace → Competitive tab
- Click + Link competitor → pick the competitor from your org’s roster
- Optionally set a per-project label override — useful when the same competitor is framed differently across projects (“Direct” in one, “Adjacent” in another)
Unlinking from a project doesn’t delete the underlying competitor or its audit history.
6. Compare your URL to the competitor (optional)
Once both have audits, you can run a vs.-Competitor compare:
- From the Research surface → click the competitor → Compare → pick which of your URLs (or draft preview audits) to compare against
- Or from a project’s Competitive tab → same flow, scoped to the linked competitor
The result lands in Orchestrations → Audit Compare, tagged as the cross-page kind. Same narrative shape as any other compare. → Concept: Audit Compare
What counts against quota
| Action | Audit-units |
|---|---|
| Add a competitor | 0 |
| Run a competitor audit | 1 |
| vs.-Competitor compare | 1 (the LLM narrative) |
Competitors aren’t gated by your max_landing_pages cap — they live on a separate axis.
The only throttle is your monthly audit-unit budget.
What’s next
| Goal | Read |
|---|---|
| Understand org-level competitor scoping in depth | Concept: Competitive |
| Run the vs.-Competitor compare | How-to: Compare audit runs |
| Use a competitor as Fasttrak’s competitive context | How-to: Fasttrak a landing page |