--- title: See how a competitor's website changed over time description: Kite reads archived copies of a competitor's website to show how its homepage, pricing, and messaging changed, which pages it added or quietly removed, and what those changes say about where the company is heading. slug: /use-cases/competitor-website-history page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I see how a competitor's website changed over time with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent see how a competitor's website changed over time? - How do I see old versions of a competitor's website? - How has my competitor's messaging changed over the years? - How do I find which pages a competitor added or removed? - How do I see a competitor's pricing page history? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-10-30' date_modified: '2026-10-30' --- # See how a competitor's website changed over time ## Key Takeaways - A competitor's website history is a record of its decisions. The homepage shows who it was trying to win, the pricing page shows how it chose to charge, and the list of pages shows which products and offers it added or gave up on. - The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds most of that history, but it shows one saved copy at a time. Seeing what changed means opening dozens of copies and comparing them yourself. - Kite reads the archived copies for you. It compares a competitor's homepage, pricing, customers, careers, and blog pages across the last two years, lists the pages that appeared or disappeared from its sitemap, and captures screenshots that show how the site looked across the company's life. - Kite then explains what the changes mean for you, such as a new audience the competitor is chasing or a plan it dropped, and saves the findings to that competitor's profile in your team's knowledge base. - No account or connection is needed, because the archive is public and built into Kite. ## Why a competitor's website history is worth reading A competitor's current website tells you what it says today. Its history tells you where it's heading, which is usually more useful. Companies rarely announce that they're moving upmarket, giving up on a customer segment, or rethinking their pricing. They just change the website, and the changes pile up quietly over months. Read in order, those changes tell a story. A homepage headline that moves from "for freelancers" to "for growing teams" shows a company chasing bigger customers. A free plan that disappears from the pricing page shows a company that wants revenue more than signups. A careers page that fills up with enterprise sales roles tells you how it plans to sell next year. And a product page that vanishes from the sitemap often means a bet that didn't work. The raw material is public. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been saving copies of websites for decades, so you can look up almost any competitor and see how its pages looked on a given date. The hard part is the reading. The Wayback Machine shows you one saved copy at a time, so finding out what changed means opening copy after copy, page after page, and keeping notes on the differences. Most people give up after the homepage. That reading is work an AI agent does well. It can open every saved copy, pull out the parts that matter, compare them in order, and tell you what changed and when. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Reading your competitors' history is part of how it understands the market you're competing in. ## How Kite shows how a competitor's website changed Kite starts with the competitor's web address. It checks when the company was founded, so the history it reads starts with this company and not with whoever owned the domain before. Then it pulls the archived copies of the pages that carry a company's strategy and reads them in order. Kite looks at the competitor's history in three ways. It compares the words on its key pages over the last two years. It compares archived copies of its sitemap to find pages that were added or removed. And it captures screenshots from across the company's life to show how the site looked in each era. Kite puts the three together into a timeline of what changed and what it means for you, then saves the findings so later research builds on them. ### How do I see old versions of a competitor's website? Kite finds the saved copies of a competitor's website in the Internet Archive and turns them into a set of dated screenshots you can scan in a minute. Instead of clicking through the archive yourself, you get a handful of pictures of the homepage, spread evenly across the company's life, from the earliest usable copy to the site as it looks today. The archive saves many sites far more often than anyone would want to read, so Kite works with at most one copy per month and picks four to six of them for the screenshots. Each screenshot keeps its link back to the archived page, so you can open any era and look around. Kite adds a short note on what the pictures show, such as a full redesign in 2022, a new logo, or a homepage that went from one product to three. Screenshots are the quickest way to see a company's visual and brand changes. They also make a good opening slide when you're presenting the competitive landscape to your team. ### How has my competitor's messaging changed over the years? Kite compares the words on a competitor's most important pages across the last two years and tells you how its pitch changed. It reads the saved copies of five kinds of pages: - the homepage - the pricing or plans page - the customers or case studies page - the careers or jobs page - the blog, changelog, or news page From each saved copy, Kite pulls the page title and description, the main headline, the section headings, the calls to action on the buttons, and any pricing text. Comparing those parts in order shows the changes that matter and skips the ones that don't, like a new footer or a rotated testimonial. Say a competitor's homepage headline read "The simplest way to send invoices" two years ago, "Get paid faster" a year ago, and "The finance platform for growing businesses" today. The button that once said "Start free" now says "Book a demo." Kite reads that as a company moving from a self-serve tool for small businesses toward a sales-led product for larger ones, and it tells you so. It keeps what it saw separate from what it concludes, so you can check the evidence for each conclusion. The other pages fill in the picture. The customers page shows which logos the competitor wants to be seen with. The careers page shows where it's hiring, which is often the clearest sign of what comes next. The blog or changelog shows what it has been shipping and talking about. ### How do I see a competitor's pricing page history? Kite reads the archived copies of a competitor's pricing page over the last two years and shows you how its plans, prices, and packaging changed. It pulls the pricing text from each copy, so you can see when a plan was renamed, when a price went up, when a free plan or a trial disappeared, or when a "Contact sales" tier appeared at the top. Pricing history explains a lot about a competitor's strategy. A company that raises its entry price and adds an enterprise tier is choosing fewer, bigger customers. A company that adds a free plan is trying to grow its user base and is willing to wait for revenue. Either change affects how you should position your own pricing against it. When you want to put your current prices next to a competitor's, see [Compare your pricing with your competitors'](/use-cases/competitor-pricing-analysis.md). To hear about the next price change as it happens, see Track competitors' pricing changes (coming soon). ### How do I find which pages a competitor added or removed? Kite compares archived copies of a competitor's sitemap, the file a website uses to list its pages for search engines, and tells you which pages appeared and which disappeared. It reads up to six dated copies from the last two years, counts the pages in each, and lists the differences between one copy and the next. New pages are often the first public trace of a new move. A new set of pages under "/solutions/healthcare" suggests a push into a new industry. A new "/vs/" section means the competitor has started writing comparison pages, possibly about you. A new "/partners" page suggests a channel program. Removed pages can be just as telling, and they're the ones people miss, because nobody announces them. A product page that disappears, a discontinued integration, or a dropped industry page usually means the competitor stopped investing in it. Kite flags those removals so you can decide whether the gap is an opening for you. The page count also matters. A sitemap that grows from 80 pages to 900 in a year usually means the competitor started publishing content at scale, which is worth knowing if you compete with it in search. ### Turn the history into something you can use Kite brings the screenshots, the page comparisons, and the sitemap changes together into a timeline that explains what the competitor changed, when, and what it likely means for you. Each finding links to the archived page it came from. Kite saves the findings to that competitor's profile in your team's knowledge base, next to its positioning and pricing. That way, the next time Kite writes a comparison page, updates your positioning, or plans a campaign against that competitor, it already knows the history. If you want something to share, Kite can publish the timeline as a report with the screenshots included, which anyone with the link can open. And when the history points to a change that's still unfolding, such as a pricing page that keeps moving, Kite can set up a watch on that page and tell you when it changes again. Website history is also one part of a full competitor profile. When you ask Kite for an in-depth look at a competitor, it includes a section on how the website evolved alongside the company's funding, hiring, search standing, and reputation. See [Run an in-depth competitor analysis](/use-cases/competitor-analysis.md). ## What you get - **A set of dated screenshots.** Four to six pictures of the competitor's homepage spread across its life, each linked to the archived page, with a short note on what changed between them. - **A comparison of the competitor's messaging.** How the headline, description, section headings, and calls to action on its homepage, pricing, customers, careers, and blog pages changed over the last two years. - **A pricing history.** The plans, prices, and packaging on the competitor's pricing page as they stood at each saved copy. - **A list of pages added and removed.** The pages that appeared in or disappeared from the competitor's sitemap over the last two years, with page counts for each copy. - **An explanation of what it means.** Kite's reading of where the competitor is heading, kept separate from the evidence behind it, and saved to the competitor's profile in your knowledge base. ## How to get started Tell Kite which competitor you want to understand and what you want to know. You might ask, "How has Fieldwork's homepage changed over the last two years?", "Show me Fieldwork's pricing page history," or "Which pages has Fieldwork added or removed since last year?" Kite pulls the archived copies, does the comparisons, and comes back with the timeline and what it thinks the changes mean. You can ask follow-up questions, ask it to look further back, or ask it to do the same for your other competitors so you can see the whole market move. If you want a regular look, Kite can repeat the check on a schedule. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. You don't need to connect anything for this work. ## Integrations used for competitor website history Kite reads a competitor's website history from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which is public and built into Kite, so there's no account to set up or tool to connect. Kite also renders pages and captures screenshots with its own built-in research tools. ## Common questions ### Why are some old versions of a competitor's website blank or missing? The Internet Archive only has what it chose to save, so the history Kite can read depends on how often the archive visited that site. A small or new competitor may have only a few saved copies, and a page that was never saved can't be recovered. Some websites also build their pages with JavaScript after they load, and the archive sometimes saved those pages as empty shells. Kite recognizes empty copies and leaves them out of the comparison, and it tells you when a competitor's archive is too thin to show a clear pattern. ### Can Kite see pages that sit behind a login or were never public? No. The archive saves public pages, so Kite can't see a competitor's product dashboard, gated content, or pages it hid from search engines. Kite reads what any visitor could have seen on a given date. For a product's inner workings, customer reviews and community discussions are usually a better source, and Kite can read those too. ### How far back can Kite look? Kite's screenshots span the whole life of the company, back to the earliest usable saved copy. Its detailed comparisons of messaging, pricing, and sitemap pages cover the last two years, because that's the window most useful for understanding where a competitor is heading now. If you want the detailed comparison for an earlier period, ask Kite to look at that era, and it will read the copies from those years. ### Is it legal to look at a competitor's old website? Yes. The Wayback Machine is a public archive run by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library, and anyone can browse it. Looking at a competitor's past public website is the same as looking at its current one. ### How is this different from using the Wayback Machine myself? The Wayback Machine gives you the saved copies. Kite does the reading. It picks the copies worth comparing, pulls out the headlines, calls to action, pricing, and page lists, compares them in order, and tells you what changed and what it means for you. For other tools in this category, see Wayback Machine alternatives for seeing how a competitor's website changed (coming soon).