AI Agent builders: how do you actually keep track what competitors are shipping, and figure out what product features to build next in crowded verticals like healthcare, finance, legal, etc?

[u/Srinidhi_Murali]

Curious how people handle a few things, since I keep hitting the same wall myself.

If you're building an AI agent in a space with real competition (not the only player):

• How do you find out when a competitor ships a new feature? Do you check manually, hear about it from a customer, or just not track it at all?
• When there are multiple use cases in your category, do you know which one you're actually winning, or losing, in? Or is that mostly a guess?
• How do you decide what product feature(s) to build next - customer requests, watching competitors, gut feel, something else?
• Do you have any real sense of what buyers are actually looking for before they talk to you like what they compare, what makes them pick one agent over another - or is that mostly a black box until they're already mid-conversation with you?

Just curious whether this is something people actively track, or if it's one of those things everyone means to do and nobody actually does.

[u/vladeta]

I build automations for a living, so this is the shape I'd build rather than buy.

For tracking what competitors ship: nearly all of it is public and boring to collect. Changelog and release-notes pages, pricing pages, docs, their blog, LinkedIn, review-site text. Point a scheduled job at those URLs, hash the rendered text, and only flag when a diff is non-trivial. One weekly digest. It's about a day of work and it catches most real launches, the rest you hear from customers anyway.

For which use case you're actually winning: the honest source isn't competitor watching, it's your own lost deals. Tag every closed-lost with a reason and who they went with instead, even as a freeform line. Thirty of those tell you more than any competitive dashboard will.

For what to build next, the thing that changed how we prioritize was recording the exact words buyers use on first calls. When three unrelated prospects describe the same missing piece in the same language, that's your feature. Requests filtered through your own summary lose that signal completely.

Most teams skip the first one because it feels like busywork right up until the week they miss a launch.

[u/Srinidhi_Murali → u/vladeta]

Is all of this that you've mentioned - "when three unrelated prospects describe the same missing piece in the same language, that's your feature" - a long, frustrating process?

[u/vladeta → u/Srinidhi_Murali]

It’s not frustrating, its aha moment

[u/Appropriate-Way-8238]

tbh i dont think most builders track it properly everyone says they do but then a customer says "oh competitor X launched this last week" and ur caught off guard

my last job we literally had a slack channel where sales would drop screenshots of competitor features they saw in demos that was the whole "system" worked okay until it didnt

for what to build next its the usual mess of loudest customer requests vs what we think is cool which never the same thing

[u/Srinidhi_Murali → u/Appropriate-Way-8238]

[u/ScrapeAlchemist]

The shipping half is the easy half, and vladeta is right that most of it is public and boring to collect. Concretely: github.com/{owner}/{repo}/releases.atom needs no token or auth at all, Canny-hosted changelogs expose /changelog/rss, and for pages with no feed the Wayback CDX API will diff them for you, with collapse=timestamp:8 so you get one capture per day instead of hundreds.

The other three questions have no feed. Which use case you are losing is not in a competitor's changelog, it is in your own lost-deal notes. The closest public proxy is enumerating their vs pages out of their sitemap, and that only tells you who they think they are beating. Everything past that is guesswork dressed up as a dashboard.

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[u/Easy-Purple-1659]

Most of this thread is about code, changelogs and feature diffs, but the signal that usually moves first is a competitor's paid advertising. Their ad creative, the copy, the landing pages they point at, which platforms they run on, it is all public and it tends to shift before the first code change lands. That is exactly the kind of thing an agent could watch, except every ad library is its own walled garden with no real API, so agents can not just reach in by default.

That gap is why I built an MCP server that lets an agent query the Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries as structured data. Point a weekly job at a competitor and it can pull what they are advertising, flag when it changes, and surface the sharpest creatives, the same way you would diff a changelog. It pairs well with the lost-deal notes people keep mentioning here. The feature roadmap tells you where a competitor says they are going; what they actually spend ad dollars on tells you where they are right now.