The questions ecommerce teams asked about competitors this month (November 2026)

The 7 most-asked questions

A count is the number of separate places the question was asked: Reddit threads, Google and Bing search suggestions, Google "People also ask" boxes, forum threads, Google searches that showed rivalsweeper.com (from RivalSweeper's Search Console), tool reviews and executive quotes. RivalSweeper grouped them by hand from items collected up to November 9, 2026: Reddit covers the last 12 months, Search Console the last 90 days, and Search Console makes up 141 of the 271 counted items, and most of the items for every question except the first and the sixth. Vendor posts, deleted threads, items RivalSweeper could not verify and askers who turned out to be building a tool of their own are not counted.

Every example below is quoted as it was written, typos included, with a link to where it was asked. The answers are meant to be useful whether or not you use RivalSweeper; where RivalSweeper does the job, we say so. RivalSweeper is commercial competitive intelligence: it tracks rivals' promotions, launches, ads, emails and homepages, with prices as one signal among them.

1. How do I see my competitors' ads? (47)

For one brand at a time, use the free libraries: Meta's Ad Library lists the active Facebook and Instagram ads of any advertiser with no login, and Google's Ads Transparency Center does the same for Google ads. Outside the EU and UK, Meta keeps no record of a commercial ad once it stops, and neither library shows what an advertiser spends on commercial ads. RivalSweeper collects the Meta ads that every competitor you monitor shows in the EU or UK, each day, and keeps them side by side with their dates, copy, links and run length.

Who asks, and what it decides: Founders and performance marketers ask it before they brief new creative or set a budget: which offers and angles rivals keep paying for, and whether a rival has gone quiet or is pushing harder.

Best practices:

• Search each rival every week, not once: the ads that stay live for weeks are the ones that work. RivalSweeper found that the median Meta ad that ended in September 2026 ran 6 days (how long Meta ads run).
• Open the link behind the ad, not just the creative: the landing page and the offer tell you more than the image.
• Don't try to read a rival's budget: Meta does not publish spend for commercial ads, so use the number of live ads, how long they run and, for ads shown in the EU, the reach Meta discloses.
• If a rival's ads suddenly vanish, check the library before reading anything into it, then check its emails and homepage for where the money went.

Read more: Ad Intelligence · How to see a competitor's Facebook ads · Black Friday 2026 plans in the Meta ads

2. How do I track competitor prices? (47)

Pick the 20 to 50 products that compete head to head with yours, record each rival's price for them on a fixed day every week, and note sale prices separately from full prices. A spreadsheet works for a handful of products; past that, use a tool that keeps the price history for you. RivalSweeper reads competitors' product pages every day and keeps a dated price history, with stock, on supported websites, next to the same rival's promotions and launches; it shows what changed and does not reprice your products.

Who asks, and what it decides: Merchandisers and founders ask it when they set a price or a markdown and need to know where they sit in the market, and stores that sell in several countries ask how to see each region's price.

Best practices:

• Compare like with like: the same product, size and pack, in the same country and currency.
• Check prices in a fresh browser session, since stores can set a country or currency on your first visit and keep it.
• Keep the full price and the sale price as separate columns, with the date, so you can tell a markdown from a price change.
• Read prices next to promotions: a rival that holds its price and runs a 20% code has cut its price all the same.

Read more: Pricing Intelligence · Competitor price monitoring tools and how to track prices

3. How do I track my brand's visibility in ChatGPT and AI search? (41)

Write down the 5 to 10 questions your shoppers ask an assistant, ask them in more than one assistant every few weeks in a fresh chat, and log which brands come back, in what order and with what reason. Answers change from one run to the next, so the trend matters more than any single answer. RivalSweeper automates part of this: about once a month it asks Google Gemini and OpenAI's open-weight GPT models six preset question sets about your brand and each competitor you monitor, and shows the latest dated answers; it does not query ChatGPT or Perplexity as products.

Who asks, and what it decides: In-house marketers ask it, often because a manager asked first, and agencies ask it for clients. It feeds where to put content and PR effort: the pages, reviews and lists that AI assistants read.

Best practices:

• Ask the question a shopper would ask, without your brand name in it, in a fresh chat with no history.
• Note the reason the assistant gives for each brand it names: that is the description you have to beat.
• Check what the assistant can read about you: your own product pages, reviews, press and comparison lists.

Read more: AI Visibility · How to track AI visibility

4. How do I track competitor promotions and discounts? (38)

A promotion shows up in three places: the site (banners, sale pages, coupon codes), the inbox (each rival's newsletter) and the ads. Log each one with its start date, its end date and the depth of the discount, so you can see how often a rival discounts and how deep it goes. RivalSweeper records competitors' homepage banners, coupon codes, newsletters and ads every day with their dates, so a new promotion is known within 48 hours and can go to Slack or Google Chat through a change feed.

Who asks, and what it decides: eCommerce and trading teams ask it when they plan their own promotion calendar, and small stores ask it when they feel forced to follow: "Many of our competitors are starting their BFCM promotions earlier and earlier, forcing us to start our own promotions sooner as well" (r/shopify, November 2025). It feeds when to start, how deep to go and whether to match at all.

Best practices:

• Record the depth and the dates, not just "they're on sale": a 20% code for three days and a 40% clearance for a month are different moves.
• Sign up as a new customer too, so you see the welcome offer and members-only codes.
• Before you match, check what the rival did last season: a rival that runs the same sale every year is no reason to cut your price early.

Read more: Marketing Messages and Coupons · Move Prediction

5. How do I find out what competitors launch? (38)

Check each rival's new-arrivals page, its sitemap and its newsletters, which usually announce a launch, and note the date each product first appears. A product can go live at its own address before it is linked anywhere on the site, so the pages you browse may not show it yet. RivalSweeper reads each competitor's catalog every day and puts new products and categories into a change feed you can connect to Slack or Google Chat, so a launch is known within 48 hours without anyone opening a website.

Who asks, and what it decides: Buying and merchandising teams ask it to plan their own range and timing; Monsoon's buyers said tracking new-in ended up "allowing us to react faster". Small brands ask it when a rival launches something close to theirs.

Best practices:

• Track launches by date, so you learn each rival's rhythm: weekly drops, monthly capsules or seasonal ranges.
• Watch categories, not just products: a rival adding a whole new category is a bigger move than one new colour.
• Look at what the rival advertises after a launch: the products it pays to push are the ones it is betting on.

Read more: Catalog Monitoring · How to detect competitor product launches

6. How do I keep track of what my competitors are doing? (35)

Pick three to five direct rivals and watch the same places every week: their ads in Meta's Ad Library, their emails (sign up with a separate address), their homepage and new arrivals, and Google Alerts for their name. Write down what changed and the date, because the pattern over months is what you will use. RivalSweeper does this for you: it puts each competitor's new products, promotions, ads, emails and homepage changes in one place, with the date of every change.

Who asks, and what it decides: New store owners and small teams ask it when they feel they are operating in the dark, and larger teams ask it before peak trading. It feeds the weekly plan: what to launch, promote or hold back.

Best practices:

• Keep the list short: three to five rivals you actually lose sales to beat twenty you skim.
• Use a fixed day and a fixed list of places, so a missing week stands out.
• Watch harder before the big holidays, when rivals change their messages fastest.

Read more: Competitor Alerts · The competitor-watch routine, step by step · Why manual competitor monitoring breaks down

7. Can I get an alert when a competitor changes their site? (25)

Yes. A free page-change monitor can watch a single page and email you when its text changes, but on a store page it also fires when products simply move around, a complaint that comes up on these tools' own forums. A competitor-monitoring tool alerts on the change itself instead: a new product, a new promotion, a new banner. RivalSweeper checks each competitor's site once a day, so a change is known within 48 hours, and sends the change types you pick to Slack, Google Chat or any RSS reader; it is daily monitoring, not real time.

Who asks, and what it decides: Teams that tried page monitors and drowned in noise ask it, and so do founders who would rather be told than check. It feeds how fast they can respond to a rival's sale or launch.

Best practices:

• Alert on the changes you would act on, such as new products, promotions and banners, not on every edit to a page.
• Send each kind of change to the team that acts on it: product changes to merchandising, promotions to marketing.
• Review the alerts once a week as well, because the pattern across a month says more than one alert.

Read more: Competitor Alerts

Also asked this month

Fewer people asked these, but they drew strong reactions. Being copied drew the most: "A competitor 100x bigger then me just ordered my new product" got 539 votes, while the threads asking how to track competitors got 10 votes or fewer each.

How we collected the questions

• Reddit: every post in 16 ecommerce and marketing subreddits from November 2025 to November 2026, read from the Arctic Shift archive, plus title searches in r/shopify and r/smallbusiness. Vote and comment counts are as of November 9, 2026.
• Search suggestions: 264 seed phrases on Google and on Bing, 781 on-topic suggestions after removing noise, plus Google's "People also ask" boxes. Suggestions show what people type, not how often.
• Forums and reviews: Shopify Community, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, and reviews of about 30 competitive-intelligence tools.
• Senior buyers: trade press (Glossy, Modern Retail, Beauty Independent, JCK, BeautyMatter), vendor case studies, job ads and earnings calls.
• RivalSweeper's Search Console: Google searches that showed rivalsweeper.com, August 9 to November 7, 2026. Many are long and conversational, which looks like AI assistants or AI-visibility tools searching on someone's behalf.
• Fact-check: a separate pass re-opened every quoted item. The counts leave out 34 posts by vendors or by people selling to the askers, 1 deleted thread, 10 of RivalSweeper's own summaries and the items RivalSweeper could only partly verify; RivalSweeper's own Reddit posts were never counted. A second check of the Reddit threads found more askers who were building a competitor-tracking tool of their own or posting the same question across many forums; they are left out of the counts too, and one duplicate copy of a thread is counted once.

Sources

• Each question above links to the thread, search suggestion, review or article where it was asked.
• Reddit archive: Arctic Shift
• Meta Ad Library: facebook.com/ads/library
• RivalSweeper research: How long do Meta ads run? and Black Friday 2026 plans in the Meta ads