CrawlPodScan your site

Competitor Poisoning Alerts

Competitor Poisoning Alerts scans competitors' robots.txt, llms.txt, and JSON-LD structured data for mentions or blocks of your brand, detects when they block AI crawlers outright, classifies the threat level of what it finds, and sends an email alert when something changes.

What it does

CrawlPod periodically checks the public, machine-readable surfaces of competitor sites you specify — their robots.txt AI directives, llms.txt content, and JSON-LD structured data — looking for direct mentions of your brand, comparison claims, or unusual AI crawler blocking behavior.

Findings are classified by threat level and delivered as an email alert, so changes on a competitor's site don't require manually re-checking their public files on a schedule.

Why it matters

Competitors can shape how AI models perceive your brand simply by what they publish or block — a comparison page naming your product, an llms.txt file steering AI agents toward their own offering, or even blocking AI crawlers from indexing pages that would otherwise surface your brand favorably. None of this requires them to do anything against the rules; it just requires you not to notice.

How it works

  1. Add the competitor domains you want to monitor.
  2. CrawlPod scans each domain's robots.txt, llms.txt, and JSON-LD on a recurring schedule.
  3. Findings involving your brand are classified by threat level.
  4. An email alert is sent when a new or changed finding is detected.
  5. Review the full history of findings from the CrawlPod dashboard.

Key concepts

  • AI crawler block detection — flags when a competitor blocks or unblocks known AI crawlers, a signal of a deliberate AI visibility strategy.
  • Threat-level classification — findings are ranked so the most consequential changes are easy to spot in an inbox.
  • Email alerts — delivered when a new or changed finding is detected, rather than requiring manual checks.

Limitations & fair usage

Competitor Poisoning Alerts is available on the Business plan and above. Scans run on a fair-use schedule to keep response times reasonable for all customers, and only check public, machine-readable files — not a competitor's private systems.