Concepts
Concepts: Competitor discovery
The four ways Rank Sonar finds and tracks competitors for your apps.
A competitor in Rank Sonar is any app you've chosen to monitor side-by-side with yours. We track competitors for all the same signals as your own apps — rank, ratings, review velocity, metadata changes — but we never expose private data (downloads, revenue) since that's not publicly available.
The four discovery methods
1. Customers Also Bought (Apple) / Similar Apps (Google)
Both stores expose a "more like this" list on every app's listing page. We scrape this list daily and surface candidates to you. Discovery method tag: also_bought.
2. Keyword overlap
When you track a keyword, the Top 3 apps ranking for it become candidate competitors. Apps that appear in 3+ of your keywords' Top 3 lists are highly likely to be real competitors. Discovery method tag: keyword_top.
3. AI-suggested
During onboarding and on demand, Claude analyzes your app's title, subtitle, description, and category and suggests competitors with rationale. The suggestions are typically 60-80% accurate; you confirm which to keep. Discovery method tag: ai.
4. Manual
Paste an App Store URL or search by name. Always available as the escape hatch. Discovery method tag: manual.
Limits per tier
- Solo: 10 competitors per app
- Pro: 25 competitors per app
- Studio: unlimited
What we track per competitor
For every active competitor:
- Rank for your tracked keywords (compared to your rank, side by side)
- Category position in their primary category
- Average rating with delta vs. last week
- Rating count with weekly velocity
- Review velocity (reviews per day)
- Metadata snapshot — title, subtitle, description, screenshots, icon, price (daily snapshot, diff alerts when changed)
- Top-charts position in their category (if they're charting)
What we don't track for competitors: downloads, revenue, retention, conversion. Apple and Google don't expose these for apps you don't own.
Metadata change alerts
When a competitor changes their subtitle, description, screenshots, icon, or price, we emit a metadata_change or screenshot_change event. These appear in your alert feed and can trigger email/Slack notifications based on your preferences.
The screenshot diff viewer overlays the old and new screenshots with a pixel-difference highlight, making it easy to see exactly what changed without opening both versions.
Removing a competitor
Visit Apps → [your app] → Competitors and click the menu icon → "Stop tracking." Historical data is retained for 90 days in case you re-add them.