An interesting excessive I did about 12 months ago:
I wanted to keep as many competitors from looking at a site of mine so they wouldn't be tempted to copy the design, features, offer as they had been doing in the past. This wasn't an amazingly tech savvy niche, which helped.
I scraped the url and email address for as many competitors I could find.
Every 5 days I had a script which generated a fake email enquiry and sent it out to all the competitors. The format of the email varied a lot so as not to make it suspicious, but each one basically included an image in the email and some reason why they must view the image (i.e. not have Outlook or whatever blocking images).
The file name of each image contained a numbered variable tied to that specific competitor, and I had a script that was catching all requests for this image, storing the IP address that requested it and logging which competitor it was into a database - then returning the image.
What this meant was I now had an (invisible) system collecting as many of my competitors IP addresses as possible on a rolling basis. Many of them had static IPs which meant they were captured from day 1 - and if the same bunch of IPs were found after 4 emails then that competitors email was only sent every 2 months. This also got dynamic IPs pretty good as well because of the email every 5 days.
After a couple of weeks I had the business IP address and in many cases the home IP address of most of my competitors.
Now I used this list of IP's to have some fun with them
I knew that a bunch of them had been ripping off ideas from my site repeatedly, and I also knew what this marketed wanted, what appealed to them etc. For a time I was showing my competitors really, really terrible templates, offers and ideas that just plain stank and would have killed conversions. I showed them bright yellow backgrounds, shitty images and giant red "buy now" buttons which wouldn't have been appropriate for the market as it is B2B.
The sense of satisfaction you get from seeing many of your competitors rip off your crappy bait site is huge and well worth the effort.
After I had some fun I just made each page load of my site load indefinitely with a sleep(7658065279865432843) or something stupid.
Oh I also kept a record of each time a competitors IP tried to load my site with the date. Every so often I go in and check these logs and am amazed to find that some of these competitors - some of the having turnover in the millions - are still trying to get onto the site only to find that it won't load for them
Could they have used proxies to view the site, or viewed them on a friends computer? Sure - but as mentioned this isn't the most tech savvy niche, so it tended to work well.
Hope that gives you some ideas of what you might want to implement, erifdekciw.
