Is it legal to monitor competitors' prices? A plain-language overview

Short version: looking at a competitor's public prices is ordinary business, and in the United States courts have been skeptical of attempts to use hacking laws against the reading of public web pages. But the details matter. This is general information, not legal advice, and the rules differ by country.

Public pages versus private data

The key distinction is whether the information is open to anyone. A price on a product page that any shopper can load is public. Data behind a login, in a customer account or in a paid API is not. Reading the first is what price monitoring is about; reading the second without permission is something else entirely.

What courts have said

In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in 2019, and again in 2022 after the Supreme Court sent the case back, that LinkedIn probably could not use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to stop hiQ from collecting data from publicly visible profiles (National Law Review, RCFP). The reasoning was that the law's "without authorization" element is hard to meet when no authorization is needed to view a public page.

Two limits apply. The ruling was about a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment, and it addressed that one federal law. A website's terms of service, contract claims and other state-law theories were not settled by it.

Why Amazon is fighting shopping agents

Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 over its Comet browser's shopping agent, arguing that the agent accessed Amazon's store while hiding its automated nature, and a federal judge granted a temporary order blocking the agent's access (eWeek, Payments Dive, Bespacific). Perplexity denies wrongdoing and says Comet acts on a user's instructions rather than scraping. The case turns on access that is disguised and on acting on behalf of logged-in users, which is a long way from a retailer checking public price pages. It does show that large platforms actively defend their sites, and that how a tool identifies itself and behaves can matter.

Sensible rules for responsible monitoring

• Read only what a visitor can see. No logging in, no bypassing paywalls, no using someone else's account.
• Be gentle. Space out requests, avoid hammering small stores and cache what you have read.
• Respect clear signals. Read the site's terms and robots rules and take a request to stop seriously.
• Decide prices on your own. Use the data to set your own prices, never to agree prices with a competitor.
• Keep personal data out of it. Prices and product details are fine; customer information is not what this is about.

How Tensorbasis approaches it

Tensorbasis reads the public pages of the stores you ask it to track and does not log in to any store. It paces its requests and keeps catalogs only to compare prices for your account. If you are in a regulated industry, in a country with different database or competition rules, or in a dispute with a particular competitor, ask a lawyer who knows your market.