The competitor analysis you were asked for will be a grid of features with ticks in it, a screenshot of somebody’s homepage, and a slide about their social following.
It will be presented once. It will never be opened again. And nothing in it will change a decision, because it answers a question no buyer has ever asked.
The grid compares what you both have. Nobody chooses a supplier by comparing inventories. They choose because of a reason, usually a reason about risk or fit or who they trust, and that reason is not on the grid because the grid was built from your product list rather than from anybody’s decision.
So there is one question worth the effort: why does a buyer pick them over us, in the buyer’s words rather than ours. Everything that does not help answer that can be dropped, which is most of it.
And the sources are not their website. They are the three things a company publishes about itself without meaning to: its reviews, its job ads, and the version of its site from two years ago.
Their reviews are the only place their customers speak
Start here, because it is the closest thing to free primary research that exists.
Read their reviews, their app store listings, their Google profile, the threads about them. Not for the score, which tells you nothing. For the language.
The positive reviews give you the actual buying criteria. People volunteer why they are pleased, and it is frequently not what the company’s marketing emphasizes. If every happy review mentions the same account manager by name, their product is not what you are competing with.
The negative reviews are a list of things you could be, one of which is probably your positioning.
And the trick most people miss: read the three-star ones. Five-star reviews are enthusiasm and one-star reviews are usually a single incident. The three-star reviews are written by people who thought carefully, liked some of it, and explain the trade-off in detail. That is where the real comparison lives.
Do this for the two competitors you lose to most, not for ten. Fifty reviews read properly beats five hundred counted.
Their job ads, read as a pattern
This is the one genuinely forward-looking source, and it is public.
A company’s careers page is the only place it publishes what it is about to build, because it has to describe the work to attract somebody to do it. A firm hiring its first enterprise account executive is telling you it is moving upmarket. One hiring three implementation engineers is telling you its product needs more hand-holding than its website admits. One hiring for a stack it did not previously use is mid-rebuild, which means slow product development for a year.
Two honest cautions, because this gets oversold.
A single posting is close to meaningless. It might be a backfill, an attrition replacement, or generic growth. What carries information is the pattern over several months and the direction of the shift, not any individual advert.
And you will see a claim that job-ad analysis predicts something like two thirds of major product pivots ninety days ahead. I went looking for the study behind that number and could not find it, nor a definition of what counts as a pivot, and every page quoting it sells hiring-intelligence software. Treat it as marketing. The practice is sound and plausible; the precision is invented.
What their site used to say
The Wayback Machine is free and almost nobody uses it for this.
Pull up their homepage from two years ago and read it against today’s. You are looking for three things.
What they added, which tells you what started working. What they removed, which is more interesting: a claim gets deleted because it stopped being true, stopped being believed, or attracted the wrong customers. And whether the headline got more specific or more vague, because vaguer usually means they are chasing a larger market and have loosened their position, which is an opening.
Pricing pages are especially worth this. A price that moved, a tier that disappeared, a “contact us” that replaced a number: each of those is a decision somebody made for a reason, and the sequence tells you more than the current state.
What to stop collecting
Three things to delete from the template, so the exercise becomes small enough to actually repeat.
Feature grids. As above. They compare inventories and buyers do not.
Follower counts and engagement rates. There is no mechanism connecting their Instagram following to your pipeline. It feels like data because it is a number.
Their content cadence. Knowing they publish twice a week tells you about their budget, not about why anyone buys from them. If their content is genuinely winning, that will show up in the reviews and in the search results, which you are already looking at.
Each of these is collected because it is collectible. That is the entire reason, and it is not a good one.
Where the other two routes live
Two sources deliberately not in this post, because they are already written up and because they answer the same question from different directions.
Asking buyers directly is better evidence than any of the above, and it has a structural trap: the person with access to the buyer is usually the one whose judgment is on trial. I went through why lost-deal post-mortems produce the wrong answer and how to fix it.
And if what you want to know is whether a competitor has moved into your channel, the auction data answers it without guesswork, which I covered as part of what to do when a channel softens.
Between those two and the three public sources here, you have better competitor intelligence than most companies with a subscription to a tool.
Where I come out
Replace the document with three things you check quarterly, in an hour.
New reviews for your two main competitors, read for language. Their job ads, read for direction of travel. Their homepage and pricing page against the version from a year ago.
Then write one paragraph, not a deck: here is why a buyer picks them, here is why a buyer picks us, and here is which of those two is changing.
If that paragraph says the same thing four quarters running, you have a stable position. If you cannot write it at all, the problem was never a research problem, and no grid was ever going to surface it.
If you’d like a second opinion on why your buyers are choosing somebody else, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on how I work cover the rest. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.