Set Up Weekly Competitor and Market Signal Briefings

Workflow area: Competitive & Market Analysis · Tier: Foundation · Hands-on time: ~25 minutes

The failure mode of manual competitive tracking is that it happens in bursts: a fire drill when a competitor launches, then six months of silence. The failure mode of automated AI tracking is subtler: confident summaries of releases that didn't happen, pricing "changes" hallucinated from stale pages, and a team that starts trusting the digest more than the sources. This playbook automates the collection and keeps the verification human.

When to use — and when not to

• Use it for steady-state awarenessa 10-minute weekly read covering 3-6 named competitors beats a quarterly panic project.
• Use it to feed sales and leadershipa curated brief with links is the difference between "I heard they shipped something" and an informed battlecard update.
• Use it for review chattercompetitors' G2 and app-store reviews are public roadmap intelligence: what their users complain about is your wedge.
• Skip it for decision-grade analysisa pricing decision or a build-vs-buy call needs pb-19's deep-research-with-verification-ledger treatment, not a weekly digest.
• Skip auto-forwarding entirelyan unreviewed AI digest sent to a sales channel will eventually state something false about a competitor, and those screenshots travel.

The recipe

1. 1.

   Define the watch list precisely. 3-6 competitors, and for each: product areas that matter to you, their pricing page URL, changelog/blog URL, and the review sites where their customers talk. A vague "track the market" prompt produces a vague newsletter; URLs anchor the search.

2. 2.

   Create the scheduled digest. In ChatGPT (scheduled tasks) or Gemini (scheduled actions), set a weekly run with this prompt — or run it manually every Monday in Perplexity, which cites as it searches:

   Copy

   You are my competitive intelligence analyst. Search for signals
   from the LAST 7 DAYS ONLY about these companies:
   
   [COMPETITOR A] — watch: [PRODUCT AREAS]; changelog: [URL];
   pricing: [URL]
   [COMPETITOR B] — ...
   
   Report, per company:
   1. RELEASES & ANNOUNCEMENTS — features, launches, acquisitions
   2. PRICING/PACKAGING CHANGES — only if visible on their pages now
   3. REVIEW CHATTER — new themes in G2/Capterra/app-store reviews
   4. MARKET SIGNALS — funding, exec moves, relevant regulation
   
   Rules: every item needs a source URL and the date it was published.
   If you find nothing new for a company, write "no signals this
   week" — do not pad with old news restated. Mark anything you infer
   rather than read directly as [INFERRED]. Under 400 words total.
   

3. 3.

   Do the Monday curation pass — 10 minutes, non-negotiable. For each item: click the source link, confirm the page says what the digest says, and check the date is actually from this week. Good curated output looks like:

   Copy

   ACME CO
   - Shipped bulk-approval API (their changelog, Aug 2) — relevant to
     our Q3 enterprise bet; eng should skim their docs. [VERIFIED]
   - Digest claimed "new usage-based tier" — pricing page unchanged
     since May. [DROPPED — hallucinated from a blog comment]
   
   REVIEW CHATTER
   - 4 new G2 reviews citing slow support (links) — matches what we
     heard in INT-04. [VERIFIED]
   

   Expect to drop something most weeks. Old news restated as new and pricing changes that aren't there are the two classic failures — that's why the pass exists.

4. 4.

   Add the "so what" line yourself, then circulate. One sentence per significant item on what it means for your roadmap or positioning. The curated brief — not the raw digest — goes to your team channel, with your name on it, because you've now earned the trust the digest gets.

5. 5.

   Tune monthly. Retire signals nobody acted on, add watch areas that kept surfacing in the DROPPED log, and rotate the review-site queries. A digest that never changes gets skimmed, then ignored.

Make it yours

• Perplexity as the manual-but-cited path: save the prompt as a Space and run it each Monday — its inline citations make the verification pass fastest, at the cost of scheduling. Good default if hallucinated links have burned you elsewhere.
• Gemini Deep Research for the monthly deep dive: once a month, pick the competitor with the most weekly signals and run a full deep-research pass — the weekly digest tells you where to point the expensive gun.
• Team scale: rotate curation duty across PMs weekly with a shared DROPPED log. The log is the underrated artifact — it teaches the whole team what AI competitive intel gets wrong, and it's the evidence for why the human pass stays.

Quality check

• Every link opened, every claim matchedthe item's source actually says what the digest says; a summary of a summary is where drift lives.
• Dates verified as fresh"this week's" news that's four months old is the most common failure; check the publish date, not the search date.
• Pricing claims checked against the live pagenever circulate a competitor pricing change you haven't seen on their actual pricing page today.
• "No signals" allowed to standa digest padded to look busy trains readers to skim; empty sections are a feature.
• The so-what is yoursimplications for your roadmap are judgment; if the brief's recommendations came from the model, you're circulating its strategy, not yours.