In a competitive market, information is the most valuable currency. But manually visiting competitor websites every week is a waste of your expensive engineering or product time.

By using GitHub Actions as a scheduled monitoring engine, you can build a 24/7 market intelligence department for $0.

1. The Pricing Watcher

Price changes are the clearest signal of a competitor's strategy shift.

• The Strategy: Create a scheduled Action that runs daily. Use a tool like Playwright or Puppeteer (which are pre-installed on GitHub runners) to visit a competitor's pricing page.
• The Logic: Extract the price elements, compare them to a prices.json file in your repository.
• The Alert: If the price changes, the Action sends a notification to your Slack with a "Diff" of the old vs. new price.

2. Feature Release Detection

Competitors often release new features slowly, starting with updates to their documentation or "What's New" pages.

• The Strategy: Monitor their documentation repositories (if public) or their marketing changelogs.
• The Logic: Use the hash-files utility to see if the content of their changelog page has changed.
• The Alert: If a change is detected, an AI script summarizes the new features and adds them to your internal "Competitive Landscape" document.

3. SEO and Ranking Intelligence

Are your competitors outranking you on key terms?

• The Strategy: Use a scheduled Action to query search APIs (or scrape search results) for your top 10 keywords.
• The Logic: Store your ranking position over time in a simple CSV file inside the repo.
• The Result: You get a monthly chart (generated by another Action) showing your SEO growth vs. theirs.

4. Turning Data into Action

Data is useless if it's not seen. The final step of any Market Intelligence workflow should be a delivery mechanism.

• The "Business Intel" Report: Every Monday at 9:00 AM, an Action aggregates all the data from the previous week into a clean PDF and emails it to the team.

Market intelligence gives you the "What." Continuous delivery gives you the "How Fast." In our next post, we'll explore Zero-Touch Deployment.