Data Sources & Methodology

Business identity, ratings & status

When you add a competitor, MarketWatch looks it up through the Google Places API — the same official, licensed source Google Maps itself runs on. From it we get a business's name, address, location, price tier, star rating, review count, and open/closed status. We never scrape Google Maps or any other site to get this data; it comes through Google's own API under Google's terms.

We only ever read aggregate rating and review count — never individual review text — and Google's terms require us to re-check this data fresh on each scheduled check rather than archive it indefinitely, which is exactly how our monitoring already works (see below). Where this data is shown, you'll see a small “Rating & status data by Google” attribution, and your Market Map shows competitor locations on an actual Google Map.

Menu items & pricing

Here's the part most competitive-intelligence tools don't tell you: there is no legitimate, licensed API that provides itemized menu or pricing data for arbitrary independent restaurants. Google, Yelp, and every other major platform simply don't expose it — and we won't scrape delivery apps or competitor websites to fake it.

So menu and price tracking on MarketWatch is owner-entered: from a competitor's profile page, you log a price you actually observed — from their posted menu, their website, or a visit. That observation is stored exactly like an automated one, feeding the same price-history charts and change-detection alerts. It takes a minute of your time in exchange for data no automated tool can honestly give you.

If you have a whole menu's worth of text handy — copied from a website, a PDF, or typed notes — you can paste it in and Gemini will structure it into items for you to review before saving, instead of typing each one in by hand. Either way, every item is something you personally provided; nothing is fetched from the web automatically.

How monitoring works, mechanically

On a schedule (daily or weekly, depending on your plan — see Pricing), MarketWatch re-checks each monitored competitor's rating, review count, and open/closed status against Google Places, compares it to what we last recorded, and logs anything that changed as a market event. Menu/price events are logged the moment you record an observation. Nothing is inferred or guessed; every event traces back to a specific observed change, and every data point records which source produced it (Google Places, or you) so it stays auditable from your Competitors page.

AI-generated insights

Market Insights and weekly report summaries are generated by Google's Gemini model, grounded only in the structured data described above — nothing else is sent to it, and it never sees your account credentials or billing information. It's instructed to say explicitly when there isn't enough data for a reliable insight rather than fill the gap with a plausible-sounding guess, and the product always shows whether a given insight came from the AI or a deterministic, data-grounded fallback (used automatically if the AI call fails or isn't configured).