Competitive Intelligence
Building a lightweight competitive-intel feed from search results instead of manual browsing.
The problem
Tracking a handful of competitors manually — checking their pricing page, blog, job postings, and press mentions every week — is exactly the kind of repetitive, low-judgment task that eats an analyst's time without needing their judgment, yet most teams still do it by hand.
How the workflow is built
Per-competitor query sets (company name plus product launch, hiring, funding, or pricing terms) run on a weekly or biweekly cadence, with results diffed against the prior run so only genuinely new mentions surface. Job posting language is a particularly reliable early signal of a competitor's product direction and is worth querying separately from general news mentions.
Example queries
"[competitor]" product launch OR announcement this monthsite:[competitor].com/careers senior engineer"[competitor]" funding round OR acquisition 2026
Pitfalls to watch for
- A competitor's own press releases and a third party's independent reporting on the same event can read very differently, and conflating the two in a summary loses the distinction between company spin and outside verification.
- Small competitors generate too little search-indexed content for a purely search-driven feed to catch meaningful signal, so this approach works better for well-covered competitors than obscure ones.
- Query sets need periodic revisiting — competitor naming, product lines, and executives change, and a stale query set silently misses the exact events it was built to catch.