RSS is the monitoring tool everyone forgot
A surprising number of competitors still publish open feeds — and almost nobody subscribes to them.
Plenty of competitors still publish RSS for their changelogs and blogs. It's the cheapest monitoring you can set up, and the most quietly ignored.
I rediscovered RSS by accident last month. I was trying to figure out why a competitor's release notes always seemed to reach me a week late, and the answer was embarrassing: they'd been publishing a feed the whole time. /changelog.rss, sitting there since 2021, updated the same hour every release shipped. I'd been refreshing the HTML page like it was 2009.
The feeds are still there
Open a competitor's changelog and add .rss, .atom, or /feed to the URL. Try the blog. Try the status page — most incident tools expose one by default. You'll be surprised how often something valid comes back. Product teams wire these up once, forget them, and they keep broadcasting long after everyone stops thinking about them.
It's not universal. Some companies killed their feeds when they moved to a fancy headless CMS. But the ones that kept them handed you a structured, timestamped, machine-readable record of everything they announce. No scraping, no login, no scheduled screenshot job. Point a reader at it and you're done.
Why it fell out of fashion
RSS didn't die because it stopped working. It died because the consumer web moved to algorithmic feeds, and the tooling around it quietly rotted. That's a consumer story, though — not a competitive-intelligence one. For watching a handful of specific companies, a plain feed is better than an algorithm: it shows you everything, in order, with nothing filtered or reordered for engagement.
The catch is coverage. A feed only tells you about surfaces the competitor chose to feed. Their changelog, maybe their blog. It says nothing about the pricing page they edited at midnight, the plan tier they renamed, the positioning line they swapped on the homepage. Those pages don't publish feeds, and those are usually the changes that matter most. RSS handles the announced; it goes blind on the quiet stuff.
Where the gap is
That gap is the whole reason nobody actually reads the #competitors channel — feeds cover the loud 20% and leave the rest to willpower. This is the part Seeto handles: it watches the surfaces that don't publish a feed, checks them continuously, and turns each edit into a discrete change event you can see side by side with what it replaced. It's not a summary and it's not magic — it's a diff on the pages that never told you they changed.
So keep the feeds. Subscribe to every changelog and status page you can find; it's ten minutes of setup and it's free. Just don't mistake a full inbox for full coverage. The feed is the part your competitor decided to show you. The changelog they route through marketing and the alerts you wish you had are two different problems — RSS only solves the first.
The tools we abandon are rarely the ones that stopped working.