Most competitor reports answer one question. Where are they winning?
Traffic. Rankings. Reviews. The scoreboard, and a scoreboard is late. By the time a win shows up in traffic, the work behind it is months old.
So I ask a different question. What are they doing right now?
Not results. Moves. Things a company has to decide, pay for and publish before anything lands in a chart.
Here are competitive intelligence examples from three rivals that sell the same thing, monday.com, Asana and ClickUp, as they looked on 12 October.
1. The ads they start
Meta has to publish every ad that runs in the EU, with the day it started.
monday had 224 live there. 149 started before October. Not one says "agent".
The other 75 started between 1 and 8 October. 13 of those do. One headline: "You set the direction. Agents get it done." Another pitches an agent that does your competitor research for you. I chose not to take that personally.
ClickUp's list tells an earlier story. 30 of its 128 live EU ads are about AI agents, all started on 17 or 18 September.
A caveat: the list only shows ads still running, so an agent ad monday switched off in the summer would not appear.
2. The markets they push into
monday also had nine ads aimed at Italy alone. All in Italian, all started between 1 and 5 October, seven about agents.
On LinkedIn, between 22 September and 9 October, all three posted sales roles for DACH: Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
- Asana: two in Munich, one of them Head of Enterprise Sales.
- monday: a Regional VP of Sales for DACH and Central and Eastern Europe, also Munich.
- ClickUp: a Growth Account Executive for DACH, based in Dublin.
Three rivals, one region, 17 days. If you sell work software in Germany, you want to know that before the first deal goes missing.
3. The people they hire
LinkedIn showed us 50 open roles at monday. Ten are "Forward Deployed" engineers and consultants in six cities, all posted between 23 September and 11 October.
A forward deployed engineer sits with one big customer and makes the product work inside their company. You don't hire ten of them to sell seats to small teams. (More on job posts as a roadmap.)
ClickUp's 49 look nothing like that. 33 are engineering roles, four of them AI engineers, two on "multi-agent frameworks".
Put the ads next to the jobs and you get one story: both are betting on agents, monday is hiring people to install them at big companies, and ClickUp is hiring people to build them.
4. The pages they build
A sitemap is the list of pages a company asks Google to rank.
ClickUp's has 29 English pages about monday.com. Comparisons, a migration playbook, a guide to the monday.com login, and one at /blog/why-monday-sucks/.
monday's sitemap has 13 addresses with ClickUp in them, all blog posts. Its own "alternative" pages go after Quickbase, Smartsheet, Trello and Wrike.
Asana's has a comparison with ClickUp in 14 languages. The one with monday.com is in Spanish only.
So ClickUp is hunting monday's buyers, and Asana is watching ClickUp. None of them said so. Their sitemaps did.
It isn't only software. Loop, the earplug brand we also track, started at least 588 new EU ads between 5 and 10 October, 290 of them on one day.
Why moves beat results
Results tell you who won last quarter. Moves tell you what they are betting on next, while you can still answer. That is what leading indicators are for.
You can't copy a result. You can answer a move.
The catch is the reading: ad libraries, job boards and sitemaps, every 14 days. That is what we do. The first benchmark is free: one domain, measured against you, no card and no call. Start here.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.