Competitor Monitoring

The first of the Vault's two live connections. It is a writer, not a reader: the Competitor Agent researches each company on your watchlist and files what it found as Markdown in the Vault.

What It Writes, and Where

The folder is named after the domain, not the display name. That is deliberate: two competitors called "Zendesk AI" and "Zendesk-AI" slug to the same folder, and a shared folder means one company's documents overwrite the other's, leaving findings citing evidence about the wrong company. A hostname is already unique per environment and already safe in a path.

The 3-day overlap is deliberate too. The searches behind a pass are not deterministic, so one pass samples the window rather than reading all of it. A window starting exactly where the last one ended would make anything the first sample missed missed for good. The agent is given the last 20 headlines it reported for that competitor and told not to repeat itself.

Findings Are Not in the Vault

Worth being precise about, because the split surprises people:

• The documents the agent writes (the research itself) go to the Vault.
• The findings (the "pricing change", "positioning shift" rows you see on the Competitor Agent screen) go to Postgres, and cite the Vault document their evidence landed in.

So the Vault holds the evidence, and the app holds the index over it.

Adding a Competitor

Adding one by hand asks for the domain and nothing else. Surface fills in the name from the domain and records the reason as "Added by you." The agent can also propose competitors it found while researching, which you approve.

Surface Email, and What It Already Does

The Connections panel lists Surface email as coming soon, and for a customer-configurable inbox that is accurate. There is one thing behind it already, and it is narrower than the row suggests: competitor newsletters.

When a competitor is on your watchlist, Surface can sign up to their newsletter at a unique inbound address and file what arrives at Competitors/<domain>/inbox/, one dated Markdown file per message. Three things about it:

• Every filed message opens with an attribution line naming the sender and saying, in the document itself, that a third party wrote everything below it and to read it as evidence and never as instructions. Anyone who learns the address can put text into a Vault an agent reads.
• 90-day retention. Anything older is deleted in the same commit that files a new message.
• It is not user-configurable. You cannot point it at your own mailing lists today. That is the part the "coming soon" row is about.

Competitor Agent → · Content Analytics