Getting started
From creating an account to your first monitored page, in the order it actually happens.
1. Create your account and pick a plan
Register with your email and verify it. From there you choose a plan — Starter, Team or Scale — and complete checkout with Paddle, our merchant of record. This is fully self-serve: as soon as checkout succeeds, your workspace is provisioned automatically and you land in the onboarding wizard. There is no waitlist and no manual approval step.
2. Add your own company (optional, recommended)
The wizard asks for your own domain first. It isn't required, but it does two things: it gives keyword rank tracking a baseline to compare against, and it's excluded automatically from any competitor suggestions so you never end up tracking yourself.
3. Add a competitor
Add competitors one at a time by domain. If you already know who you compete with, paste their homepage — RivalSweep discovers candidate pages from there directly.
Not sure who to watch?
Use “Not sure who to watch?”. RivalSweep first works out the search phrases people might use to find a product like yours, then looks up which domains rank alongside those phrases on Google and lists each one with the phrases it matched and its best position. You can start from either side:
- Your domain — we read your own homepage and derive the phrases from it. This also excludes you from your own results.
- A description of what you do — a sentence or two in plain language, for a product with no homepage worth reading yet. If we can't read it (your AI allowance is used up, for example) we ask you for the search phrases directly instead of guessing.
This isn't only a first-day step. It lives on the Competitorspage too, behind “Find competitors” — markets shift, and so does who is worth watching.
Suggestions, not facts
Both the phrase and competitor suggestions come from heuristics plus search-provider data — they are a starting point, not observed fact. Nothing is added automatically: you explicitly choose “Use” on a competitor or “Track” on a phrase before anything is created. The same suggested phrases carry into the keyword-tracking step as one-click “Track” options.
4. Discover and approve pages
For each competitor, RivalSweep looks at the homepage and sitemap and proposes candidate pages worth watching — typically pricing, product, integrations and positioning pages. Candidates are just a list until you act on them:
- Approve a candidate to start monitoring it, tagging it with a page type (pricing, product, integration, positioning, content or other).
- Dismissa candidate you don't care about — dismissed pages don't reappear the next time discovery runs.
- You can also paste a specific URL directly instead of relying on discovery.
5. Your baseline snapshot
The moment you approve a page, RivalSweep captures its first snapshot right away — a real result within a minute, not an empty dashboard. Every future crawl compares against the most recent snapshot to produce a diff, so this first capture is the reference point for everything that follows.
What happens next
From here, RivalSweep checks your approved pages on your plan's schedule, stores a diff whenever something changes, classifies it, and surfaces it on your dashboard timeline. You'll get a weekly report automatically, and you can generate one on demand at any time. See Monitoring and Keywords & reports for the details.