Competitive Intelligence

TL;DR: Marketers need new competitive intelligence tools to understand — and boost — their visibility in AI search. Here's why finding the right new tools matters so much, plus tips for what to look for when you're ready to uplevel your approach to collecting, analyzing, and activating competitive intelligence for both brand and hyper-local impact.

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is the data that brands collect and analyze about their competitors. Then, brands use it to edge out the competition and gain strategic advantages with customers.

Why is competitive intelligence important to brands?

Competitive intelligence helps brands answer three big questions:

1. How are we performing?

2. How do we compare?

3. What do we need to do next?

In other words, brands must use competitive intelligence to understand market trends and customer expectations. The intelligence informs everything from product development and feature innovation to benchmark performance in the top AI search platforms.

For example, a restaurant chain may find competitive intelligence that prompts gluten-free menu options. A regional credit union may use competitive intelligence to launch a high-yield CD. If benchmarking shows competitors have a more positive sentiment, a brand may launch a series of social media campaigns or adapt its approach to review management.

Discover the 6 key search performance metrics right now. See What's Helping (or Hurting) Your Traditional and AI Search Performance

Types of competitive intelligence

Typically, brands look for and act on both strategic and tactical competitive intelligence.

Strategic competitive intelligence informs high-level, directional decisions about how to go to market, how to develop products or flex services, and how to position your brand in light of industry, technology, regulatory, and customer behavior trends.

Strategic competitive intelligence examples include:

• Reputation intelligence: measuring customer sentiment and how the public perceives your brand

• Technological intelligence: tracking advancements in competitive intelligence software and the impact on customer and competitor behavior

• Competitor intelligence: analyzing your competitors' standing, strengths, and strategies so you can outperform them

Tactical competitive intelligence guides decisions about how to execute based on the decisions that come out of strategic intelligence and the day-to-day data marketers are working with.

Tactical competitive intelligence examples include:

• SEO and local SEO analysis: understanding the impact of your brand's and your competitors' profiles, rankings, visibility — and perception – in AI search

• Customer review analysis: gathering insights from your brand's and your competitors' customer reviews to understand your positions and opportunities

• Social media monitoring: tracking competitor digital presence and engagement on social media platforms, including customer engagement and sentiment

Use competitive intelligence to earn more credibility in AI platforms: How Google's E-E-A-T Framework Impacts Brand Visibility in AI Search Results

Why competitive intelligence matters in AI search

As SEO shifts toward AEO, marketers are facing a new visibility problem. The problem is due to a few factors:

• Tools aren't built for the AI era: Legacy tools and general dashboards still mask regional and local search performance in SEO. The visibility is even worse in AI search platforms.

• SOV isn't enough: Tracking share of voice (SOV) is important. But without contextual data, it may be a vanity metric. It's easy to inflate SOV with paid presence and, typically, SOV doesn't reflect customer sentiment.

• Inconsistency hurts: Some locations get great visibility, while others never surface in AI or local search. Some marketers are guessing and trying to adapt. Others can't make location-based adjustments (no matter what data they're working with). Others cannot scale winning insights across locations, even when they have them.

In short, visibility without context (and the insights that come along with it) puts your brand at risk. Your visibility strategy and tactics are full of missed opportunities to address competitive threats, resolve reputation gaps, and improve local brand performance.

Use these local marketing strategies to improve your visibility now. Read 6 Ways to Improve Your Local SEO Strategy in the Age of AI Search

Competitive intelligence tools to improve discoverability in traditional, local, and AI search

AI search is redefining discovery, and brands need a way to keep up. The new competitive intelligence needs to step up from traditional search and marketing dashboards.

Brands need to know how they perform locally and across AI platforms, and benchmark against competitors. Marketers also need intelligence that shows why you and your competition are performing this way. Plus, brands need intelligence that shares clear data about what customers are actually seeing when they discover you and your competitors in AI search.

To compete today, brands need intelligence that's:

• Hyper-local: because customers search and convert locally

• Hyper-competitive: because search marketing is changing fast

• Search-specific: because AI answers aren't tied to blue links

• Actionable: because data is only useful if it drives decisions and change

Some tools, like Yext Scout, are catching up to this shift. Scout gives brands both high-level and granular visibility into local competitors across AI and traditional platforms. Brands that adopt these insights early will gain a measurable edge in visibility, trust, and growth.

Compare your brand's visibility to local competitors. Run a scan with Scout.