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How to see a competitor's pages from before you started watching
When you add a competitor, Rival Radar looks for earlier copies of their pages in the Internet Archive and turns them into history, so you don't start from zero.
Updated November 9, 2026
Watch how, in a short video
The annoying thing about any monitoring tool is that it starts the day you install it. Rival Radar tries to fix that: when you add a competitor, it goes looking for earlier copies of the pages you're watching in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and turns what it finds into dated history.
On a well-archived pricing page that can mean a couple of years of price changes before you've watched them for a day.
Step by step
Add the competitor
Nothing to switch on. The search starts on its own once a page is being watched.
Open the competitor
The History section is under Earlier versions from the Internet Archive.
Read the status line per page
Each watched page gets a line saying where it got to: still looking, how many versions it found and how far back, or that there were none.
Read the changes it reconstructed
Underneath, each change it worked out from those copies, with its severity, which page, and the dates it happened between.
Check it against the archive
See every saved copy opens the Wayback Machine's own calendar for that page, and each change links to the archived copies either side of it.
Look at the pricing card too
Price changes found this way also appear in Price history, marked as coming from archived copies. See price history.
Why the dates are ranges
The archive only has a copy of a page from whenever its crawler happened to visit. If it saw a page in March and again in June, and the page differed, all anyone can say is that the change happened somewhere in between.
So these changes are dated as a range, and both archived copies are linked. That's honest about what's known, and it's still far more use than nothing.
Changes from the archive are kept out of the live dashboard feed on purpose, so two years of backfill doesn't bury this morning's price rise. They live on the competitor's History card.
Why coverage is patchy
Gaps are normal and they're not a fault. Rival Radar looks back about two years and takes what's there.
- Big, well-linked sites get crawled often. Small ones may have a handful of copies, or none at all.
- Pages that build their content with JavaScript are sometimes saved before the content appears, so the copy exists but has nothing readable in it.
- A few companies ask the archive not to keep their pages.
- The archive is a free service run by a charity and it isn't always available. When it isn't answering, Rival Radar backs off and tries again later rather than giving up.
The status line says which of these you've hit, in plain words, per page.
How long it takes
Minutes to hours, depending on how much the archive has and how busy it is. The work runs in the background in small batches, so a page can say it's still looking for a while without anything being wrong.
It only runs once per page. There's no button to re-run it, because the archive isn't going to have saved anything new about last year since the last time we asked.
Questions
Is this on the free plan?
Yes, on every plan, for every page you watch.
Can I do this myself?
Yes, and it's worth knowing how. Paste a page's address into web.archive.org and pick dates off the calendar. The guide on seeing a competitor's pricing history walks through it. What Rival Radar adds is doing it for every page at once and turning the result into dated changes.
Does this use my scan allowance?
No. It reads the Internet Archive, not the competitor's live site, so it doesn't touch the allowance your scheduled checks use.
Why does one page have history and another none?
Because the archive saved one and not the other. Pricing and homepages tend to be the best covered, since they're the most linked-to pages on any site.
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