Clearing 2026 Competitor Tracker

I led the Web Analytics workstream of the AI Taskforce at Aston University, set up by Emma Tronson MCIM. The goal was to give Aston an edge for Clearing 2026 over competitor universities.

The problem was timing. Competitor entry requirements can change at any point on Clearing day, with no fixed schedule. The only way to catch a change was to manually refresh each competitor’s website, across 7 universities and 270+ courses. Doing that by hand all day was slow and easy to get wrong.

How it works

I built an automated tracker that checks competitor course pages on a set schedule, every 30 minutes on Clearing day itself. It covers 7 universities: Birmingham City University, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, University of Sheffield, University of Wolverhampton, and Coventry University, across 270+ courses. Whenever a real change happens, it is logged straight away.

Why these tools

Playwright reads each competitor’s course pages, even though every site is built differently. GitHub Actions runs the checks on schedule, so nothing needs to run on a server all day. Every detected change gets written to Google Sheets through its API, the tool the team already uses, so there was nothing new to learn.

Results

• Replaced all-day manual checking of 7 competitor websites
• 270+ courses tracked, checked as often as every 30 minutes on Clearing day
• Every real change logged the moment it happened

What I learned

The scraping and scheduling were the easy part. The part that mattered just as much was putting the results somewhere the team would actually check on a busy day, which is why Google Sheets, not a new dashboard, was the right call.