Which is great, if you sell a physical thing. Catalogue, price, variants, reviews, ad creative, all of it works.
Try pointing that at a software company and watch it produce nothing at all. No catalogue. No variants. No product reviews. A benchmark full of dashes.
Software leaves a completely different set of fingerprints, and they are all public.
Shipping speed. Their changelog, diffed every run. Not how many entries, which entries. A changelog that goes quiet for six weeks tells you something, and so does one that suddenly fills up with small fixes, which is usually a large launch coming.
(One lesson from building this: we once read a changelog as "285 entries with no date". It was actually 275 dated entries, and ten undated ones that happened to sit at the top of the document. The order of a page decided what we believed about a company. That is the kind of mistake that produces a confident wrong answer, which is worse than no answer.)
Adoption. GitHub stars are vanity. Downloads are use. We take weekly and monthly npm figures plus the daily trend, because stars measure who liked the idea and downloads measure who is running it in production.
Reliability. Their status page. Incidents, frequency, how they write about them. A competitor with a rough month is a competitor whose customers are currently taking calls.
Pricing. Every change to the packaging, which in SaaS is the strategy. Adding a seat limit is a bigger move than changing a price.
Money and people. Total raised, latest round, type, date, investors. Plus what they are hiring for, which is the roadmap they have not announced.
There is a sixth I would add if it fitted the headline: the size of their surface. How many integrations, comparison pages, customer stories, partner pages, webinars and templates they publish. A competitor who publishes a comparison page for every rival in the category has decided to fight in public, and that is a strategic posture you can read straight off a sitemap.
The counting is fiddlier than it looks. One brand had 188 integrations in the sitemap and only 152 links on the actual page, because the page lazy-loads the rest. Another had an entire app catalogue that appears nowhere in their sitemap, but the page carries 93 links. So we take whichever route finds more, and say which one we used.
The honest limit: all of this needs a public changelog and a public status page. We probed five candidate pairs for a case study once, and two of them fell out for the same reason. No public changelog. If your competitor keeps everything behind a login, several of these signals simply do not exist for them, and we will say that rather than fill the row.
One thing to do next: open your closest competitor's changelog and count entries in the last 30 days.
Then count yours. That ratio is your actual competitive position.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.