MSPs: What your competitors are doing that you can’t see

I know of two types of MSP owner.

The first never looks at their competitors at all. Heads down, focused entirely on their own business, vaguely aware there are other MSPs in their area but doesn't know much about them and frankly doesn't care.

The second checks their competitors’ websites every week. Screenshots their LinkedIn posts. Knows exactly what they’re charging. Gets a genuine knot in their stomach when a rival wins an award or lands a big client.

Neither of these approaches is right or wrong and if you ask me, I'm more the first kind of person than the second. However I think we all need to have a certain awareness of what our competitors are doing, because it reflects what's happening in the marketplace.

Let me talk you through how to do this, and give you six specific tools (I bet you a lollipop that you'll find at least one of them incredibly useful).

PART ONE: The strategy

Why ignoring competitors entirely is risky

If you never look at what other MSPs in your area are doing, you have no idea how your prospects see the market.

You don’t know if your pricing looks reasonable or wildly out of step. And you have no idea specifically who they're comparing you to when they're in the research phase.

It's good to track who's in the market, who's entering, who's exiting, who's getting bigger, who's struggling, etc etc.

Why obsessing over them is worse

The "checking-every-week" MSP owner has a bigger problem. When you spend a large proportion of your energy watching what everyone else is doing, you start reacting instead of leading. Someone launches a new service, so you scramble to copy it. A competitor drops their prices, so you start second-guessing yours.

And you’re comparing your raw reality inside your head and heart to their carefully curated LinkedIn highlights. That’s not a fair fight, and it never will be.

The middle ground

The answer isn’t more willpower or more discipline. It’s to remove yourself from the equation almost entirely. Set up tools that quietly watch your competitors for you, then review what they find now and again.

When you do sit down to review it, ask yourself three questions:

1. Is there anything here I should genuinely be worried about, or learn from?
2. Is there a gap in the market that nobody local is filling?
3. Does anything here actually change what I should be doing... or is it just noise?

Most of the time, the answer to that third question is “it’s just noise.” And that’s fine. The point isn’t to find a reason to change course. It’s to confirm you’re not missing something important.

And and actually, no MSP loses a deal because a competitor was slightly better. They lose it because they were inconsistent. Your own implementation matters much more than whatever the MSP half a mile away is doing this month.

PART TWO: The tools

This is not a complete list in any way. But here are six ways to let software do the watching, so you don’t have to.

1) Google’s new information agents

Google announced this at I/O in May. It’s a genuine evolution of Google Alerts. Rather than emailing you a messy list of links, you can set up a background AI agent that continuously scans the web for a competitor’s name and sends you a summary only when something changes. It’s rolling out this summer to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Worth setting up the moment it’s available to you.

2) Google Alerts (in the meantime)

Until information agents are fully rolled out, plain old Google Alerts still works and costs nothing. Set one up for each competitor’s business name and you’ll get an email whenever they’re mentioned somewhere new online. Rougher than the new version, but free and instant.

3) Follow them on LinkedIn and Google Business Profile

The simplest option of all and entirely free. Follow your local competitors’ company pages and the owner’s personal profile. If you're not comfortable with them seeing that you've done that, get a non-MSP friend to follow them for you.

4) Visualping

Point it at a competitor’s homepage or pricing page and it’ll alert you the moment something changes. You can describe in plain English what you care about, so you’re not getting pinged every time they fix a typo. Free tier available, plus paid plans for more pages and more frequent checks. Genuinely useful if you want to know when a competitor changes their messaging or pricing without checking manually.

5) Hexowatch

A step up from Visualping if you want more detail. It can track a competitor’s pricing specifically, monitor for new pages appearing on their site, and even flag changes to their technology stack. WAAAAAY more than most MSPs need, but worth knowing about if you want deeper visibility on one or two key competitors. Paid only, with a short free trial.

6) Your AI friend, used quarterly

Once a quarter, copy the text from a competitor’s website or a handful of their recent LinkedIn posts and ask your AI tool of choice to summarise their positioning, their apparent USP, and anything that stands out. If you use the same thread for this (especially in an AI with a good memory like Claude), then it'll help you spot what's changed over time.

If you're rubbing your thighs at the thought of one of these paid monitoring tools, you're probably overthinking this. Just keeping a basic check on your competitors via LinkedIn or using something like Visualping is enough for the vast majority of MSPs.

So tell me... are you the MSP who never looks, or the one who can’t stop checking? Let me know, honestly. I read and reply to every email 😃