Competitor Tracking Chrome Extension: Automate the Checks

What should you track on a competitor's extension?

A store listing has dozens of facts on it. Most of them never change, and some change all the time for no useful reason. Five fields carry nearly all the signal.

Version is the cleanest signal. A new version number means new code went live. On its own it tells you that they are active, not what changed, so pair it with the other fields.

Permissions are the most telling field. When a rival adds a permission like tabs, scripting or a new host such as a payment site, they are almost always building something new. Google's permissions list explains what each one allows, so you can read the change in plain terms. We cover this in depth in what permission changes tell you.

Rating count is the best growth number you can see, because the store shows it exactly. Users are rounded: a listing jumps from "10,000+" to "20,000+" in one step, so a change in users can just mean a line was crossed. Use rating count for growth and treat users as a rough size label.

Description changes are where pricing shows up first. Watch for words like Pro, Premium, trial, team or credits appearing for the first time. Our guide to tracking competitor prices walks through what to do when you spot one.

Rating count is exact. Users are rounded. Measure growth with the exact one.

How often should you check?

Daily checks on every rival mostly record nothing, because most extensions don't ship daily. In our crawl, the twelve largest extensions in the price trackers niche had all shipped within the last 23 days, but only three had shipped in the last two days.

A simple rule that works:

• Daily for your two or three closest rivals, the ones your buyers compare you with.
• Weekly for the next ten.
• Monthly for everyone else in the niche, mostly to catch new entrants.

Daily checks on close rivals are about timing. You want to hear about a price change the week it lands, while you can still answer it.

How to set up a competitor tracking Chrome extension workflow in an afternoon

You don't need a big tool to start. Here is a setup that works with a sheet and a small script, or with a sheet and a calendar reminder if you would rather not code.

1. List your rivalsPut each rival's name and store ID in a sheet. The ID is the 32-letter string at the end of the store URL.
2. Choose your fieldsVersion, permissions, rating, rating count, description and the website link. Skip everything else for now.
3. Save a first copyFill in today's values for every rival with today's date. This is your baseline, and you will not alert on it.
4. Save again on scheduleEach day or week, add a new row per rival with the new values and the date.
5. CompareFor each rival, mark any field that differs from the last row.
6. ConfirmOnly treat a difference as real when the next save shows it too.
7. Summarise weeklyOnce a week, write three lines: who changed what, and what you will do about it.

If you would rather skip the script, Ext Watch saves these fields for every listing it crawls and keeps each change with its date, so you can open a rival and read its history.

A worked example: the price tracker niche

Say you are building a price tracking extension. The price trackers niche in our crawl holds 395 extensions, 89 of them with more than 10,000 users, rated 4.43 on average. Those 89 are your market. A handful of them are your real rivals.

Here is what the top of that niche looked like on 3 Oct 2026:

A few things jump out before you track anything:

• Users and ratings tell different stories. Honey has about 35 times more ratings than Keepa, but only about three times more users. Ratings are the better guide to how many people actively care.
• Release pace differs. Buyhatke's version number is already at 167 in its fifth major line, a sign of frequent small releases. If you track it daily, most changes will be routine. Keepa ships less often, so each update is more worth reading.
• Close rivals are not always the biggest. If you are building a price history tool for Indian shoppers, Buyhatke is your daily check and Honey is a monthly one.

With that list in a sheet, your first week looks like this: Monday you save the baseline, Tuesday Honey's version is unchanged, Thursday Coupert ships a new version. You note it, confirm it on Friday's save, then open the listing to read what changed in the description. That is the whole loop, and it takes a few minutes a day once the sheet exists.

Why does a tracker raise false alarms?

Your first comparisons will lie to you. On 2 Oct 2026, our own first crawl flagged 33 "publisher changed" events. None were real. They came from comparing two different formats of the same publisher ID. We now ignore every change on the first tracked day.

Common causes of fake changes:

• Different formats. A number saved as "1,000" one day and "1000" the next looks like a change.
• Partial page loads. A page that loaded halfway has no description, which looks like the description was deleted.
• Rounded numbers. Users crossing a bucket line looks like a jump.
• Language. The store can show a translated description depending on where the request comes from.

A rival changing owner is a special case worth its own watch: a new publisher name plus new permissions within a few weeks is the pattern. See how to spot an ownership change.

What should you do when a rival changes something?

Tracking is only useful if it changes what you do. Three kinds of change deserve a response:

1. A new permissionRead what it allows, then install the update and find the feature. If it is something your users have asked you for, move it up your list.
2. New pricing wordsVisit their pricing page, save a dated copy, and compare it with yours. Our guide to pricing an extension has a simple way to decide whether to match or hold.
3. A jump in rating countCheck their newest reviews on the listing. A burst of reviews often follows a launch, a feature in a newsletter, or a review request inside the extension.

Most weeks nothing important changes, and that's fine. The value is in the one week something does.

Doing it without code

If a script isn't your thing, a weekly calendar reminder and a sheet will catch most changes. Open each rival's listing, copy the version, rating count and the first two lines of the description, and paste them into a new row. Ten rivals take about fifteen minutes. You will miss exact timing, but you will not miss direction.

When the list grows past ten, or you want history from before you started, a tool helps. For the data options, see Chrome Stats API alternatives. To compare two rivals side by side, use Ext Watch compare.

We are biased, since we build Ext Watch, but a spreadsheet is still a fine start. Add five rival IDs to a sheet today. Next Tuesday will thank you.