Ask your AI to benchmark competitors instead of doing it manually. Trends MCP gives your AI live web traffic estimates, brand search volume trends, news sentiment, and social momentum data for any competitor - without logging into SimilarWeb, SEMrush, or Google Trends separately.
Updated 2026-08-19
Competitor tracking with live signals is a repeating brief: list domains and brand names, pull traffic, branded search, news, and social growth for the same windows, then rank who is gaining attention. As of August 2026, one MCP or REST API covers 25+ platforms, keeps weekly history of about five years, and scores each series on a 0-100 index so a traffic estimate and a search series can sit in one table. The free plan is 100 requests per month. Starter is $19 per month. The assistant returns the ranking. Strategy still decides what to do about it.
A competitor brief from public momentum starts with a frozen list of domains and names, runs 3 month, 6 month, and 1 year growth on web traffic, Google Search, and news, then adds weekly history for anyone whose slope changed. The list must stay frozen. Renaming a rival every week makes the time series useless.
Traffic answers whether the site is attracting visits. Branded search answers whether people are looking for the name. News volume and news sentiment answer whether the press cycle is helping or hurting. Social sources answer whether communities are talking. App download series answer whether a mobile product is actually being installed. Market research uses the same stack for categories. Competitor tracking uses it for named rivals.
Ranked web-traffic growth is the greenfield scan when the set of rivals is incomplete. Emerging domains sometimes show up in year-over-year visit growth before they show up in an industry report. Live news feeds show which narratives are loud this week. Neither replaces the named list. They recruit names onto it.
Traffic estimates and branded search disagree often, and that disagreement is the brief, because rising visits with flat branded search can mean SEO or referrals that do not teach the name, while rising branded search with flat visits can mean people are looking and landing somewhere else.
Web traffic data on this path is sourced from SimilarWeb panel estimates. It is directionally useful for sites with over 50,000 monthly visitors. It should not be treated as an exact visit count. Small sites sit below that floor and will look noisier. Keyword suites such as Semrush still own keyword-level organic rankings and paid share. Those logins stay. The MCP path removes the need to open three trend UIs to answer "is this rival still climbing."
The 0-100 index is the comparison glue. Absolute visit guesses and absolute query guesses are different units. Normalized history of about five years shows whether a rival's latest quarter is a new high or a recovery from a dip. Strategy teams that only quote the latest percentage miss that shape.
A launch is measured by comparing news sentiment and news volume, branded search, and traffic in the windows before and after the ship date, then reading weekly history so a one-week spike is not called a new market position. The day of the blog post is almost always a spike. The sixth week is the test.
If news turns negative while search still rises, people are curious and unhappy. If traffic rises while search is flat, distribution may be working harder than brand. If social volume rises on TikTok or Reddit without search, the launch is still a community story. Brand monitoring uses the same pattern on the home brand. Competitor tracking uses it on everyone else.
App-based rivals get an extra series. Install-trend growth after a version launch is the user-acquisition check that a homepage visit count will miss. Query the bundle ID, not a slogan. Keep the identifier stable across months.
A multi-source trend API usually comes first in a competitive stack because one connection covers 25+ platforms, weekly history of about five years, and a shared 0-100 index, including traffic, search, news, social, and apps, before anyone opens a deeper audience dashboard. Similarweb-class dashboards still own deeper audience composition, referral mix, and geography when the license includes them. Semrush-class suites still own keyword difficulty, ranking URLs, and paid auction insights.
The workflow is a funnel. Momentum in the assistant decides which rival is moving. The heavy dashboard is opened for the two names that actually moved. Copying five CSV exports into a slide every Monday is the slow version of the same funnel.
Pricing for those dashboards is quoted by sales teams. Check current pricing rather than inventing a number. As of August 2026, the trend API path is 100 requests per month on the free plan and $19 per month on Starter, which is enough for a weekly ranked table on a short rival list if each domain is not pulled hourly.
Accuracy floors change the reading: traffic estimates below about 50,000 monthly visits are weak, tiny brands produce jumpy social percentages, and a 0-100 index is relative to each series rather than a share-of-market point, so direction stays useful while false precision does not.
News sentiment after a launch can be dominated by a handful of outlets. Pair it with volume. A single scathing review in a quiet month looks huge in percentage terms. Five years of weekly points show whether coverage this loud has happened before.
Legal and IR teams still need filings, pricing pages, and win-loss notes. Public momentum will not show a private discount, a churn cohort, or a contract. It will show whether the market is paying attention, and whether that attention is getting healthier. The tools below are the calls that brief uses.
Tools for this workflow
get_trendsChart web traffic and branded search history for any competitor over 5 years - see how their audience has grown, stalled, or declined relative to yours.
get_trends(keyword='competitor.com', source='webtraffic', data_mode='weekly')get_growthBenchmark multiple competitors in one call: compare web traffic, branded search, and news coverage growth side by side - see who is gaining and who is losing ground.
get_growth(keyword='competitor.com', source='webtraffic, google search, news sentiment', percent_growth=['3M', '6M', '1Y'])get_ranked_trendsIdentify the fastest-growing players in any market by web traffic or search demand - surfaces emerging competitors before they appear in industry reports.
get_ranked_trends(source='webtraffic', sort='yoy_pct_change', limit=25)get_top_trendsMonitor what topics are gaining media attention in your competitive space right now - see which competitor narratives are dominating news and Reddit at this moment.
get_top_trends(type='Google News RSS', limit=20)FAQ