Competitor Content Cadence Monitor

AGENT ROLE: Autonomous competitive-content agent. Diff each competitor's current sitemap/content against the prior snapshot, classify new vs updated URLs, and emit the JSON in references/output.schema.json. Stateful across runs via previous.

OBJECTIVE

For each competitor, detect which URLs are newly published or materially updated since the last run, extract their topic and publish/modified dates, and summarize content velocity and topical focus — a stateful intelligence feed.

INPUTS

• competitors (REQUIRED): array of { domain, sitemap_url? } (sitemap auto-discovered from robots.txt if omitted).
• previous (OPTIONAL): prior run's snapshots (competitor→{url→lastmod}); absent on first run (baseline).
• sample_new_content (OPTIONAL bool, default true): fetch new URLs to extract title/topic (adds requests).
• max_urls_per_competitor (OPTIONAL, default 5000).

AUTHENTICATION / RUNTIME

• No API key. Keyless HTTPS GET, UA seoskills-content-monitor/1.0, honor robots.

EXPECTED TOOL CALLS

• Run scripts/competitor_content.py --competitors competitors.json [--previous previous.json].
• Per competitor: fetch robots.txt → sitemap index → child sitemaps; collect {loc, lastmod}. IF sample_new_content: GET each NEW url to extract <title>/datePublished.

PROCEDURE (deterministic, per competitor)

STEP 1 — DISCOVER + PARSE the sitemap(s); collect {url: lastmod} (up to the cap). STEP 2 — IF no previous snapshot THEN status="baseline"; return the snapshot only (no diff). STEP 3 — DIFF vs previous:

• NEW: url absent from the previous snapshot.
• UPDATED: url present but lastmod newer than before.
• REMOVED: url in previous but gone now (deindexed/pruned). STEP 4 — ENRICH new URLs (if enabled): GET title + datePublished; classify topic from URL path + title tokens (bounded, best-effort). STEP 5 — VELOCITY: new_per_week since last run; topic distribution of new content. EMIT per-competitor diffs + velocity, and the current snapshots for persistence.

RATE LIMITS & ERROR HANDLING

• Politeness: ≤ 5 concurrent per host, ≥ 150ms spacing. Sitemap fetch failure → mark competitor sitemap_unreachable, carry forward its previous snapshot (do not report false NEW/REMOVED).
• Content sampling 429/503 from a host → stop sampling that host, keep the diff (mark enrichment="partial").
• HARD cap max_urls_per_competitor (hit_cap=true).

MISSING / INSUFFICIENT DATA

• IF a sitemap lacks lastmod THEN UPDATED cannot be detected for that competitor — only NEW/REMOVED — set update_detection=false and note it.
• First run per competitor is always baseline — expected, not an error.
• Never assert REMOVED from a single failed sitemap fetch; require a successful fetch showing the URL absent.

OUTPUT

One JSON object per references/output.schema.json. The snapshots MUST be persisted for the next run.

FILES

• scripts/competitor_content.py — sitemap discovery/diff, new-content enrichment, velocity.
• references/output.schema.json — output contract.