Intelligence Panel on the Analyze page — Each competitor page now opens with a Signal Timeline showing recent competitive events (releases, review clusters, support shifts) alongside a download sparkline. You see the story at a glance instead of switching between tabs.
Forum Health tab on the Analyze page — A dedicated view of support forum health for each competitor, including resolution rates and response patterns. Navigate between the forum tab and the main Analyze page without losing your place.
AI competitor snapshot — The top of each Analyze page now includes a short AI-generated summary of that competitor’s current position: recent moves, momentum signals, and areas of risk. Refreshes automatically with new data.
Release cadence comparison — The Compare page now shows how often each competitor ships, replacing the previous active installs chart (which was always flat and unhelpful).
Website content playbooks — When Rivale detects a competitor’s website change, it now generates a playbook with specific actions. Joins the existing set of playbooks (stale competitor, review clusters, download spikes, etc.).
Review evidence in playbooks — Playbook cards about review trends now include AI-extracted quotes from the actual reviews, so you can see the evidence behind the signal without leaving the page.
Smarter review tagging — Reviews now go through a two-pass system: keyword classification first, then AI correction. Tags that the AI disagrees with are overridden, so review sentiment is more accurate across your dashboard, digests, and playbooks.
Competitor names are now clickable in emails and Slack — Weekly summaries and Slack messages now deep-link competitor names directly to their Analyze page.
Improved
Daily digest reads like competitive intelligence, not a status report — On quiet days, the digest now highlights interpreted trends (“Competitor X hasn’t released in 45 days”, “Rating trending down with no response”) instead of “No key activity detected.” Subject lines now pull from the top observation.
Notification subject lines are more specific — Email and Slack alerts now include the type of event and link directly to the relevant section of the app.
Opportunity signal language is clearer — Signals like “support gap” and “review decline” replaced internal names like “forums crisis” and “review crisis.” Copy across notifications and playbooks uses neutral, factual language.
Sidebar shows your plugin list with download sparklines — Quick visual scan of download trends for all your tracked competitors without opening each page.
“Low-Star Reviews” tab label — The Momentum Tracker tab previously labeled “Reviews” now says “Low-Star Reviews” so you know exactly what you’re looking at.
Momentum Analysis stats are accurate — Six stat mismatches (install deltas, snapshot limits, query scoping) were corrected. Numbers now match the underlying data.
Fixed
Compare Content tab no longer crashes — Opening the Content tab on the Compare page could crash the page due to a shared cache key conflict. Fixed. The empty “Releases” column that showed a count with no time window has also been removed.
Special characters now display correctly everywhere — HTML entities like en dashes and smart quotes were showing as raw codes (e.g., –) in notifications, Slack messages, playbook cards, and chart labels. All output paths now decode these correctly.
Quiet-day digests no longer fail to send — When no competitors had activity, the digest template received an empty string, which bounced with a 400 error from the email provider. Fixed with a proper fallback.
Weekly summary always includes a competitive insight — Previously, if no dramatic signals existed, the AI insight field was left blank. It now always populates with a deterministic observation based on your competitors’ data.
Playbook “stale competitor” day counts are accurate — Day-since-last-update calculations were rounding down, so a plugin with 31.5 days of inactivity showed as 31. Now rounds up correctly.
Milestone emails no longer fail for some plugins — A database lookup error caused milestone emails to fail when a plugin had multiple stat records. Fixed.
Review excerpts now show even when the review title is empty — Some WordPress reviews have content only in the description field. Rivale now extracts excerpts from description as a fallback, and backfilled existing reviews that were affected.
