Everything about a modern pricing page is contingent on who is looking at it. That is what makes desk research unreliable and a person in the market cheap by comparison.
What to put in the public brief
- The country or countries
- That screenshots are required
- Roughly how many pages
- Device, if it matters
- That only publicly visible pages are in scope
Keep the competitor names and the exact URLs private. A public brief naming who you are watching is a brief your competitor can read.
What to put in the private instructions
Give exact URLs, not names
"Their pricing page" invites a search, and search results differ by market too, so you would be measuring two variables at once.
Say logged out, no VPN, own connection
And ask them to confirm they did. The condition is the whole methodology.
Ask for the full page, currency included
Not a typed number. A screenshot showing the currency, the tax line and any regional banner carries context a transcribed figure loses.
Set the boundary explicitly
No account creation, no trials, no contact forms, no quote requests. Say it in the brief so nobody has to guess where enthusiasm stops.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
Full-page screenshots with the timestamp visible, the city, and the currency as displayed.
Do not ask for
Anything behind a login or a form. If the price is only available on request, this task type cannot reach it, and pretending otherwise means asking somebody to misrepresent themselves on your behalf.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If you need continuous monitoring, a scraping service is cheaper and more consistent. Use this for the markets where automation fails or where you need to see the page as a person does.
If what you need is the experience of buying rather than the price of it, that is a checkout test run against your own funnel, not a competitor's.