You want to know one thing. One. What is their site built on.
So you find a tool. The tool has a pricing page with three tiers and a "contact us" on the one you need. You fill in a form. You get an email from someone named Brad. Brad wants fifteen minutes. Brad wants to understand your use case.
Brad, my use case is that I wanted to know one thing.
Four of the most useful things you can learn about a competitor cost us nothing to run, which means there is no reason to put them behind Brad.
The tech stack, first. HTML signatures, read straight off their pages. On one brand it turned up eleven technologies, including Shopify, Klaviyo, Yotpo, Okendo, Trustpilot, Hotjar, Clarity and a Snapchat pixel. Both Yotpo and Okendo running at the same time, which is a question worth asking on its own.
The legal pages, second. Not a legal opinion, and I want to be careful here. We check whether the pages the law requires actually exist (privacy, terms, cookies, returns, shipping, imprint, accessibility, contact) and which consent platform runs the banner. That is a policy audit, not a compliance verdict, and anyone writing "GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA and more" on a marketing page is making a legal claim they cannot back.
The shape of the site, third. How many pages, in which sections, and which ones are new since last time.
And press, fourth. Around 100 news hits per run, straight from RSS, free.
Individually each one is mildly interesting. Together they are a picture of a company, and the whole thing costs us nothing but a few minutes of compute.
So we give it away. One competitor, measured once, no card. That is not a growth hack, it is just that charging for something with no marginal cost felt silly.
What you do not get free is the recurring part, and that is the honest split. A snapshot tells you where they are. Only a second snapshot tells you where they are going, and the second one is the one worth paying for.
One thing to do next: pick the competitor you know least about, not the one you think about most.
The one you know least about is where the surprise is.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.