Competitor Analysis From Public Sources

Put the decision at the top of the page before you read anything. It tells you which sources matter, which to skip, and when you're done. Each common decision has its own place to start:

• A live deal: their pricing page, comparison pages and recent reviews
• Positioning: their homepage and customer stories, today and a year ago
• Pricing: how their pricing page has changed, tier by tier
• Whether to build a feature: their release notes, help docs and reviews that mention it
• A board update: their filings, funding news and hiring

Analyze one rival at a time. If you're weighing a whole field, sketch a competitive positioning map first, then go deep on the two or three you meet most often.

Work from what the competitor and its customers have published. For each fact, record the exact page or document, the date you read it, and a short quote when the wording matters. If you can't find a source, write "not found" rather than borrowing a traffic tool's estimate.

1. 1

   Read their own pages

   Start with the homepage, product and pricing pages, customer stories and any comparison pages. Note who they say they serve, in their words.

2. 2

   Read their reviews

   On G2, Capterra, app stores or Google, read the past year of reviews. Tally praise and complaints by theme, not by star rating.

3. 3

   Read their job posts

   Open roles show where the money is going. Four enterprise sales roles and no self-serve roles suggest a move toward bigger customers.

4. 4

   Check patents and trademarks

   Patent applications show what a rival has been working on, with a lag: US applications are generally published about 18 months after they're first filed¹. Trademark filings can reveal a product name before launch, since a company can apply for a trademark it only intends to use².

Keep your methods honest. SCIP, an association for competitive intelligence professionals, asks members to disclose their identity and organization before all interviews³. It also warns that posing as a customer may be illegal in some places.

In the US, federal trade secret law counts misrepresentation as an "improper means"⁴ of acquiring a secret, but not reverse engineering. Free trials are another matter: some terms of service forbid use by competitors, so read them before you sign up.

Today's pricing page shows a price. Its history shows a strategy: a free plan dropped, an entry price raised twice, or listed prices replaced by "Contact sales."

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine may hold dated copies going back years. Enter the pricing page's address to see a calendar of the days it was captured. The archive's help center suggests choosing the blue dots⁵, which mark good captures.

Open one capture per quarter for the past two years and note each change. Captures have gaps, so a quiet stretch isn't proof nothing changed. From now on, save a copy of the live page each time you read it.

If the rival is a US public company, read its annual report on Form 10-K, free on the SEC's website. Two sections matter most for a competitor analysis.

Item 1 describes the business. SEC rules list competitive conditions⁶ among the topics it may cover, and ask for the number of people the company employs. Check which rivals they name, and whether you're one of them.

Item 1A covers risk factors. The rule asks that each risk sit under a heading that describes it⁷, so the headings alone read like a list of their worries. Generic risks, if any, go last under "General Risk Factors." Everything above that heading is meant to be specific to them.

Private companies don't publish reports like these. For them, the pricing history, reviews, job posts and patent filings carry the analysis, and the gaps stay marked.

Give each claim its own row, with columns for them, you, the source and date, and when to check it again. Put the rows you couldn't source at the top, so nobody mistakes a gap for a fact.

Next, look for agreement between independent sources. When the pricing history, job posts and reviews all point to bigger customers, you have a finding. One angry review is an anecdote.

Write a short readout for the people who will act on it: the finding, two or three claims they can repeat with a source, and what to do differently. Say what the rival does well, too. Reps who need a one-page version for calls can turn it into a sales battlecard.

Every fact has a shelf life. Pricing can change in any month and positioning every quarter or so, while a fact from a filing holds until the next one. Put the earliest recheck date at the top of the document.

Tracking several rivals at once? The competitive intelligence report template keeps them in one matrix, with a source and date for every fact. For a first draft on one rival, use the tool at the top of this page. It reads their public record and fills in the grid, dates included.