How to keep an eye on competitors every week using ChatGPT

Small businesses rarely have time to watch the competition properly. You glance at a rival's website now and then, and mostly you learn what they are up to from customers, which is the worst possible way to find out.

ChatGPT can do the watching for you.

Set up a weekly check

Pick your three to five closest competitors. Then create a scheduled task in ChatGPT:

Every Monday morning, search the web for news, new services, price changes, job adverts and customer reviews for these companies: [list with websites]. Summarise anything new from the last week in a short list per company. If nothing has changed, just say so. Include links.

Job adverts are an underrated signal. A competitor hiring three sales staff, or a specialist in something you do not offer, tells you a lot about where they are heading.

Read it with a pinch of salt

Web search is not perfect. It may miss things, and occasionally it will misattribute news to the wrong company. Treat the summary as a prompt to look, not as fact, and click the links before acting on anything important.

Turn it into decisions

The value is not the summary. It is the conversation it prompts. Once a month, look back at four weeks of notes and ask: is anyone undercutting us, is anyone offering something customers keep asking us for, and is anyone getting much better reviews than us, and why?

Making it more serious

If pricing really matters in your market, we can build a proper tracker that records competitor prices over time and alerts you to meaningful changes, rather than relying on a weekly read. For most businesses, though, the simple version above is plenty, and it costs nothing beyond a subscription you probably already have.