I check their login page first

A competitor's homepage had not changed in four months. Their login page had. Somewhere in that window a small "Sign in with SAML" link appeared under the password field, and above it, a text input asking for a workspace subdomain. Nothing was announced. No changelog entry, no launch post. The company had moved anyway, and the only place it showed was a screen most people never look at twice.

Nobody sanitizes a sign-in screen

Marketing pages are written for strangers. They get reviewed, argued over, and softened until they describe the company the founders want to be. A login page is different. It gets shipped by whoever owns authentication, for people who already pay, and the copy is functional because it has to be. That asymmetry is the whole reason it's worth reading.

So you get the unvarnished version. Which identity providers they support. Whether "Continue with Microsoft" sits next to "Continue with Google" now. Whether there's a region picker, and whether one of the regions is in the EU. Whether the screen still offers a link to create an account, or quietly stopped.

Reading the affordances

Each element implies a deal that already closed.

A SAML or SSO option means someone required it in a contract and engineering shipped it — enterprise buying is real, not aspirational. A workspace or subdomain field means the mental model shifted from individual users to tenanted organizations. "Contact your administrator" in the error copy means admins now exist. A data-residency selector usually means European procurement pushed on it. And when the "Sign up" link disappears from the login screen entirely, self-serve is no longer the front door; sales is.

None of this replaces reading their integrations page or their trust page. It corroborates them, and often does so earlier, because a login screen ships when the feature ships rather than when marketing is ready to talk about it.

The honest caveat

A single screenshot tells you the current state, not when it changed. That SAML link might be two weeks old or two years old, and your memory of what it looked like last quarter is worse than you think. This is the narrow thing software is actually good at: Seeto watches public surfaces like this continuously and reports differences as discrete, timestamped change events. It won't tell you why the SAML link appeared — that's still your read — but it will tell you the week it did, which is the part people reconstruct wrong.

Date it, then corroborate: which pricing tier now lists SSO, whether a security engineer opening went up, what the docs say. Worth adding to whatever you baseline on day one.

Everyone monitors the pages a competitor wants read. The useful ones are the pages they forgot were public.