Keeping tabs on what competitors are publishing is one of those tasks that sounds simple but eats time if you do it manually. You open a few tabs, check a few profiles, and then do it again tomorrow. It is not hard, it is just relentless.
The good news is that most of the platforms where competitors publish content still support RSS, which means you can get notified the moment something is published without logging into anything.
What RSS actually is
RSS is a format that websites use to publish a feed of their content. When a site has an RSS feed, any RSS reader or monitoring tool can subscribe to it and get notified when new items appear. The feed contains the title, URL, and usually a summary of each new post.
Most blogs have RSS. YouTube channels have RSS. Reddit, Substack, Medium, GitHub releases, and podcast feeds all use it. It has been around for decades and it still works well.
What you can watch
Company blogs. Most business blogs expose an RSS feed, usually at /feed, /rss, /blog.rss, or similar. Adding a competitor's blog to your monitoring setup means you get an email the moment they publish something, without needing to check their site.
YouTube channels. YouTube generates an RSS feed for every channel. If a competitor is active on YouTube and you want to know when they post a new video, the feed URL is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID. You can find the channel ID in the URL when you visit their channel.
Substack newsletters. Every Substack publication has an RSS feed at https://[publication].substack.com/feed. If a founder or thought leader in your space publishes on Substack, this is a low-effort way to stay across their output.
GitHub releases. If a competitor ships software, their GitHub releases page has an Atom feed at https://github.com/[owner]/[repo]/releases.atom. You get an alert every time they tag a release, which is a reasonable signal for what they are building.
Reddit. Subreddits have RSS feeds. If there is a community where your product category is discussed, monitoring it for mentions can surface competitor activity and customer feedback at the same time.
What you cannot watch directly with RSS
Twitter/X does not have public RSS feeds anymore. LinkedIn does not expose feed URLs for company pages. Instagram and TikTok have no public feed format. For these platforms, there is no clean automated solution without paying for API access or using unofficial scrapers.
The practical approach for most businesses is to use RSS where it works (blogs, YouTube, newsletters, GitHub) and do a manual sweep of the locked platforms once a week rather than constantly.
Pairing feed monitoring with website monitoring
RSS feed monitoring tells you when a competitor publishes something new. Website change monitoring tells you when they update something that already exists. Pricing pages, product pages, and feature descriptions change without any announcement, and they do not appear in any feed.
Running both gives you a more complete picture. The feed tells you about new content. The website monitor tells you about quiet changes to existing pages.
Grouping everything by competitor
If you are watching multiple signals for the same competitor, grouping them makes the dashboard cleaner. One group per competitor with their website, blog feed, and YouTube channel inside it. The group card shows a red dot if anything is new or changed, and you can open it to see what.
Setting the right check frequency
For RSS feeds, checking every 30 to 60 minutes is usually enough. Blog posts and videos are not published with the kind of urgency that requires a 5-minute polling interval. Setting a slightly longer interval keeps things tidy and avoids unnecessary requests.
For competitor pricing pages or product pages where you want fast notification, a shorter interval makes sense.