Most competitors get analyzed the same way SynapSee analyzes your own site: by reading their sitemap. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s exactly as thorough as the sitemap itself is. But sitemaps aren’t always cooperative, and that’s what AI Scout is for.
The default: sitemap crawling
When you add a competitor with a sitemap URL, SynapSee follows it — including sitemap index files, the kind that point to a handful of smaller sub-sitemaps rather than listing every URL directly. This is the default for a reason: it’s deterministic, it costs nothing beyond your subscription, and for the large majority of competitor sites, it just works.
When a sitemap isn’t enough
Three situations tend to break the default path:
The sitemap is missing entirely. Some sites don’t publish one, or publish it somewhere non-standard that SynapSee’s crawler doesn’t find automatically.
It’s blocked. A competitor’s server configuration or a security plugin on their end sometimes prevents automated requests from reading the sitemap, even though a browser can see it fine.
It’s malformed. Occasionally a sitemap exists but doesn’t follow the standard closely enough for reliable parsing — broken XML, unexpected structure, that sort of thing.
Any of these leaves SynapSee with a competitor row it can’t meaningfully analyze through the normal path.
What AI Scout does instead
Switch that competitor’s row to AI Scout and enter their bare domain instead of a sitemap URL. At analysis time, your configured AI provider’s own web search tool browses the domain directly — Anthropic’s search scoped to that domain, a site-specific search operator for Gemini, or OpenAI’s Responses API domain filter, depending on which provider you’ve connected. The provider does the browsing; SynapSee never touches or stores what comes back, and neither do we.
Why it’s opt-in, not automatic
AI Scout calls a metered, billable search feature on your provider’s side, on top of the normal token cost of the analysis itself. That’s real money, even if it’s usually a small amount, so it’s something you choose to spend rather than something that happens by default. The sitemap path stays the default for every competitor precisely because it’s free — AI Scout is there specifically for the rows where the free path doesn’t work.
A practical rule of thumb
Add competitors the normal way first, with sitemap URLs, and only switch a row to AI Scout if the analysis comes back with nothing useful for that competitor, or you already know their sitemap is unreliable. There’s no reason to spend the extra provider cost on a competitor whose sitemap works perfectly well.
Checking what it cost you
AI Scout’s cost shows up the same place every other token cost does — the Dashboard’s Tokens Used stat, which sums usage across the entire run, main analysis and any AI Scout calls included. Worth a glance after your first run using it, just to get a feel for what the extra step actually costs on your particular provider.
— The TDX7 Team · synapseradar.com/