Shipping log
We work on this every week. This is the record — what shipped, on what date, and why it matters if you are the one reading the brief. Newest first. Small fixes are not listed; if it changed what you receive, it is here.
Last updated 2026-08-19
If a business on your competitor list turns out to share an ultimate owner with you, we take it off the list and tell you why rather than removing it quietly. Sibling locations that genuinely compete for the same customers on the same street stay — common ownership is only disqualifying when it means you are watching yourself.
Attention spent on a corporate sibling is attention not spent on a real rival, and a roster you cannot explain is a roster you stop trusting.
Matching a news story to a business now keys on the words that actually make its name distinctive, and ignores the generic trade words that hundreds of businesses share — the Kitchens, the Dentals, the Auto Groups. Every story we had previously matched correctly still matches.
A story credited to the wrong competitor is worse than no story: you act on it, and you act on the wrong business.
We now work out which outlets actually cover your market, then read those outlets for you and for each competitor. Every story link is checked live before it can reach your brief. Most days for most businesses this finds nothing, and says so.
Local outlets break small-business news — a closure, a bankruptcy, a new location — days before a national aggregator does, and often instead of one ever doing so.
If you sell into an industry rather than compete in it — hood cleaning, linen supply, dental labs, equipment servicing — we no longer file you as a member of that industry.
One supplier was being shown seven of the businesses that pay it, listed as competition.
Changes we detect now appear as individual dated cards with their sources, instead of being summed into a line like “3 competitors expanding”. Competitor names stay masked until you subscribe.
A number proves nothing. A dated, sourced finding you can go and check yourself is the only honest way to show what the product does.
We replaced the single fixed search radius with one that tightens in dense areas. In a packed metro your competition is measured in blocks; in a rural market it is properly measured in miles.
A business was leading its brief with a chain 17 miles away while a direct competitor sat one mile off. Your lead item should be someone you actually compete with.
Before building a brief — in the demo and for subscribers — we check whether the business has permanently closed, and cross-check its name against our own closure findings. If it has closed, we say so plainly instead of producing advice.
A closed business was being told to post a hiring ad. Google's own listing status lagged the real closure by nine days, so the cross-check is what catches it.
Ninety-six questions answered across the site — pricing, how the briefs work, what we do and do not monitor — each grounded in the page it sits on rather than repeated boilerplate.
More people reach us by asking an AI assistant about us than by any other route. These are the answers it reads.
Regulatory change is the second-largest class of signal we report, and it used to end in “monitor their website”. It now lays out the decisions actually in front of you: whether the work still pays, whether to hire or contract someone qualified, or whether to leave the service line — including what exiting one involves.
The findings most likely to change what you do were producing the least usable advice on the page.
Rewritten for the person who runs the business: plain labels and examples, six ways out of the page instead of twenty-seven, a fixed light theme, and your business name carried straight into the demo. Come back later and we do not ask for your email again.
It is the page most people meet us on, and it had been written in a vocabulary its actual visitors do not use.
Consultants can generate one consolidated brief covering the last two or four weeks for any client — the conclusions, not the feed. If the period was genuinely quiet, it says so rather than manufacturing significance.
Your client keeps the daily proof of work. You get one document you can walk into the meeting holding, instead of twenty emails to reread.
The web version of a paid brief now includes a zoomable map with every competitor pinned. It appears once there are at least three to plot, and it is deliberately absent from the masked demo — a pin at a street address identifies a business no matter what the label says.
Your competitive landscape is a geography. Reading it as one tells you things a list cannot.
A brief could open with a confident count of competitors that had “triggered” something, directly above a line saying we had not found a competitor in range. Those numbers were not measuring anything. They are gone; what is left is counted from real findings.
For an intelligence product, a number a reader can disprove against their own market in five seconds costs more than saying nothing.
We work out your real market from your name, your website and where you are, rather than from a category label. Businesses with several distinct product lines get competitors for each, and the list spans the size range rather than clustering at one end.
A hosting-billing platform had been shown a legal-practice tool, a gym scheduler and a yard-logistics app as its competition.