Competitor Customer Reviews in Compete

Where the reviews come from

The four sources are G2, Capterra, TrustRadius and Trustpilot. You choose them per competitor on the Track a competitor form. Compete then looks for that competitor's review page on each site. If you entered a link to a page on the review site itself, that link is used. Otherwise it searches for the competitor by name or domain and takes the first matching review page. Trustpilot has a second path: it searches its own site, and falls back to a guess based on the domain.

Because Compete takes the first matching result, check that the reviews shown belong to the right product. If they do not, add the competitor again and enter the review page link on that site in the Competitor field. The name cannot be changed on an existing competitor, only its display name.

On G2, Compete opens the list sorted lowest rated first, so the first page holds the complaints a buyer would weigh.

What is stored

Each review keeps the site, the review title, the text, the author name, the publish date and the link to the review. The text is cut at 4,000 characters. Ratings are put on a 1 to 5 whole number scale, whatever the site uses. TrustRadius reviews are stored without a rating, because the rating is not reliably in the page.

Reviews are evidence, so they are stored once and never rewritten. The same review read on two weekly fetches is one row. If its author later edits it, the edited version is stored as a second row.

Compete does not filter by rating when it stores. Every rating is kept, so a five star review is there like any other. What matters is left to you.

Reading them in the app

Open a competitor from the Competitors tab. The Reviews panel sits under Recent moves. Its heading shows how many reviews are loaded, up to the 50 most recently stored. Each row shows the site, the rating out of 5, the date, a link to open the review, the title and the text. Long text is cut after 280 characters with a Show more control.

The filter has two buttons: All and 3 stars or fewer. The second shows only reviews with a rating of 3 or lower. Reviews with no rating are not shown under it, which means TrustRadius reviews only appear under All.

Fetch statuses

Every fetch for a site records one outcome. analyzed means reviews were found. no_results means no review page could be found or the page held no reviews. error means the page did not load. timed_out means it took too long.

The panel only speaks up when something went wrong. Under the heading it adds a line such as Last fetch: G2 did not load, Capterra no reviews found. The wording is did not load for error, timed out for timed_out and no reviews found for no_results. A site that loaded normally adds nothing. Until the first fetch finishes, the panel says No reviews stored yet. They are fetched with each refresh.

How often and how deep

A fetch is queued with each refresh of the competitor: the weekly automatic one, and a manual refresh from the card. A site is fetched at most once a day for each competitor, so pressing refresh twice in one day does not read the same pages twice. Compete reads up to two pages of reviews per site, and a first page that comes back empty is retried once.

Fetching follows the same plan checks as the refresh itself, so it only runs for a refresh you are entitled to.

FAQ