Step one: pick the list, and keep it short
Name the competitors that appear in your actual deals. For most teams that is three to eight companies. Add an adjacent name only if a move by them would change something you do.
Companies, not keywords. A named company can be followed across every source at once: their pricing page, their boards, their filings, their newsroom. A keyword can only be followed through text that happens to contain it, which is news and almost nothing else.
Step two: wire the sources in this order
Ordered by value delivered per hour of setup:
- Pricing pages. Highest impact, and archived captures give you history immediately.
- Job boards. Six public boards cover most software companies; the posting date is the signal.
- Filings and registers, where the competitor is a filer.
- Their own newsroom or RSS feed. The company speaking for itself.
- Documentation and changelog pages, which usually move before an announcement.
- News last, and only with hard deduplication in front of it.
Step three: deduplicate before you alert
Cluster coverage of the same event and send one item that says how many independent sources carry it. Without this, one competitor announcement produces a dozen notifications and the recipients mute the channel inside a week.
Step four: tune with a weekly review
For the first month, spend ten minutes a week reading not just what arrived but what was held back. The discards tell you whether the scoring matches your judgement, which is the only way to calibrate it.
Two questions each week: did anything arrive that wasted my time, and did I learn about anything from a customer that should have arrived here? The first tunes the threshold up, the second tunes it down or adds a source.