A weekly competitor brief from public ads, pages and search data

Set the ground rules first

Write the ethics into the workflow’s notes and the Relay’s instructions before anything runs. These are the rules most teams agree on:

• Public information only. Pages anyone can see without signing in, public ad libraries, and reports from SEO tools you pay for.
• Respect each site’s terms. If a site’s terms or robots rules say no automated access, take it off the list and check it by hand.
• No logging in. Nothing in the setup creates accounts on competitor sites, never signs in as anyone, and never tries to get past paywalls or bot checks.
• No copying creative. The brief describes what a competitor says and where. It does not reproduce their ads or copy for reuse.

Keep these rules in the Relay’s instructions, and in your positioning note in the Knowledge Base, so anyone reviewing the setup can read them.

List the sources per competitor

Pick three to six competitors. For each, list the main site, pricing page, launch or news page, YouTube channel and the public ad library pages to check, such as the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center. Put the list in a small sources table the workflow reads.

Choose a tool for each kind of source

Each source type suits a different integration. A Relay can call the ones on its allowlist directly, but a weekly sweep is easier to review as a workflow, so collection lives there and the Relay uses the same tools for follow-up checks.

• Browser Use runs a cloud browser that visits pages and acts on them like a person would. Use it for ad libraries and pages that need clicks or filters to show results. It is billed per task, so keep the list tight.
• Firecrawl scrapes or maps a site, which suits pricing pages and launch pages you check every week. Exa searches the web and finds similar pages, which catches launches and coverage you did not know to look for.
• Semrush and Ahrefs give read-only reports on a competitor’s paid and organic keywords, top pages and backlinks. A competitor that starts bidding on your brand name shows up here first.
• YouTube search and channel video lists cover public videos and their comments.

For Instagram, keep to what is public. Your own account insights from the Instagram integration give a baseline to compare against. For competitor posts, have the team add links they have seen to the changes table, rather than scraping profiles.

Schedule the workflow and the Relay

Start the workflow with a Schedule block, for example Sunday night. An Agent block compares what the blocks return with last week’s rows in a changes table in Tables, and a Table block adds only real changes: competitor, source, what changed, link and date seen. A price that moved, a new product page, a new run of ads or a new keyword cluster all count. A redesigned footer does not.

Give the Relay a weekly schedule after that, for example Monday 07:00 with your time zone, and bind the changes table to it. It reads the new rows and, where a row needs context, uses web search, web fetch or its cloud browser to look at the public page. Under Observe it can only look.

Write the brief around what it means

Ask for a short brief: what changed, with a link to the source, then two or three lines on what it means for you, judged against your positioning note. The Relay drafts it as an email. Relays never send email without an approval, under any autonomy level, so the strategist reads it, edits it and approves. Keep the recipient policy on internal only, the default, so the brief cannot reach anyone outside the company.

Review the first month by hand

For the first four weeks, have the strategist check every row in the changes table against the source. Remove sources that produce noise and add ones the team kept checking by hand. Once the brief is trusted, use it to steer creative production and the commentary in client reports.