Know what your competitors shipped, weekly

Competitor research has a bad reputation because most of it is done in a panic, after losing a deal, and consists of reading their homepage and feeling uneasy.

Done weekly and briefly, it is a different thing. You stop discovering changes six months late.

Name three, not ten

Pick the three you actually lose deals to. Not the market leader you never compete with, and not every company in the category.

Three is enough to see a pattern and few enough that the brief stays readable. If you cannot name three, ask your salespeople rather than guessing; they know.

Ask for changes, not descriptions

The difference between a useful brief and a boring one is entirely here. A description of a competitor is a thing you can read once. A change is news.

Every Friday at 8am, research these three competitors and tell me what
CHANGED this week.

For each one, look for: new or repositioned products, pricing changes,
notable hires or departures, funding, and any shift in how they describe
who they are for.

Write one short paragraph per competitor. Cite a source for anything
specific.

If a competitor did nothing worth reporting, say "no change" and move on.
Do not pad it with background I already know.

End with one line: anything here that should change what we say?

"No change" has to be an allowed answer or the whole thing rots. A weekly brief that always finds something will start finding things that are not there, and once you have read two briefs of filler you stop reading the third. Most weeks, most competitors genuinely do nothing.

Check the sources on the first one

Read the first brief with the links open. You are checking one thing: whether a "change" is actually recent, or whether it is a two-year-old page the research found for the first time.

That is the characteristic failure of this kind of research, and it is easy to correct once you have named it.

Act on the last line

The closing question is the point of the whole exercise. Most weeks the answer is no. The weeks it is yes, it usually means one of your competitors has started making a claim you also make, and it is now doing less work for you.

That is worth knowing in the week it happens rather than in the quarter you next rewrite your site.

What good looks like

Five minutes on a Friday, mostly "no change", and three or four times a year a paragraph that genuinely alters what you say next.

If you find yourself skipping it, the brief is too long. Cut it to one paragraph per competitor and it will get read again.