Staying on top of your competitive landscape is one of those things everyone knows they should do but few do consistently. It takes time. The information goes stale. And there’s always something more urgent.
One way to solve this is by building a workflow that handles it automatically. Every Monday morning, a structured competitor analysis lands in Slack and email. No manual research. No outdated spreadsheets.
Here’s how to think about it.
Start with a trigger
The workflow runs on a schedule. Monday at 08:55 works well for a weekly cadence. Could just as easily be daily or bi-weekly depending on how fast the market moves.
Let an agent do the research
The first step is an AI agent that understands the company and the space it operates in. It searches for competitors offering similar tools and pulls structured information for each: company name, description, website, core features, pricing model, target sectors. Technical details like database infrastructure and LLM usage can also be captured, which is useful for positioning.
Clean and deduplicate
Raw data is messy. A second set of agents formats everything consistently and filters out companies already tracked. This keeps the dataset clean over time rather than bloated with duplicates.
Store and distribute
The cleaned data goes into a Google Sheet. From there, it gets sent to Slack and email. Could just as easily push to Notion, Airtable, or wherever the team works.
Why this approach works
Competitor research isn’t a one-time project. Markets shift. New players enter. Pricing changes. A system that runs continuously keeps teams informed without requiring anyone to remember to do it.
This is especially valuable in sales conversations. Instead of scrambling to remember how the product compares, there’s a current reference ready to go.
Build your own
Want to set up something similar? Comment “AI” below and we’ll share the template.
See the template here:
https://needle.app/workflow-templates/discover-new-competitors-with-deep-research
