Automated Competitive Intelligence and Press Reviews With AI

The real problem with monitoring: filtering, not access#

Information has never been easier to access. Search engine alerts, RSS feeds, industry newsletters and social media deliver hundreds of headlines nonstop. The problem is the opposite: too much content, not enough time to sort it.

Most monitoring setups end the same way. You subscribe to a dozen newsletters, create a few alerts, then stop opening them after three weeks because the essentials are buried in noise.

An AI monitoring agent doesn't give you more information. It gives you less, better chosen: it reads everything you won't, applies your criteria and only sends what deserves your attention, summarized in one sentence with a link to the source.

Press review or competitive intelligence: two distinct needs#

The two complement each other. The press review keeps you up to date on the context; competitive intelligence flags specific moves you can react to.

Setting up a daily press review#

Step 1: Choose topics, not keywords#

Classic alerts work on keywords and so bring back any article containing the word, even off-topic ones. An AI agent reads the article and judges whether it really covers your topic. So describe your interests in sentences:

• “Changes to energy-efficiency regulations for residential renovations”
• “Shop openings and closures in downtown Boston”
• “Funding announcements from logistics startups in Europe”

Step 2: List your sources#

Name a few reference sources (a business daily, a trade publication in your industry, a professional association's website, an expert's blog) and let the agent supplement them with a web search. If a source publishes an RSS feed, reading it is even more reliable.

Step 3: Set the format#

A useful press review fits on one screen. The library template offers three sections, two to four headlines each, a one-sentence summary and the link. You can ask for a “Watch list” section for weak signals, or a “What this means for you” line under each headline.

Step 4: Pick the time and channel#

A review sent at 7:30 a.m. gets read over coffee; at 11 a.m. it gets lost in the inbox. The agent can send it to you by email, to a Slack or Teams channel for the whole team, or on WhatsApp if you prefer.

Sample brief#

Monday to Friday at 7:30 a.m., prepare my press review on three topics: short-term rental regulations, the property market in Edinburgh and the Lothians, and announcements from the big agency networks. Prioritize the Financial Times, the main property trade press and official housing statistics, then supplement with a web search. Three sections, three headlines max each, a one-sentence summary and the link. If nothing important was published on a topic, write “Nothing notable” rather than padding. Email it to me.

That last instruction matters: a good monitoring agent must be able to say there's nothing. A review that fills space at all costs trains you to stop reading it.

Setting up weekly competitive intelligence#

What the agent watches#

For each competitor you name, the agent can track:

• Pricing and offer pages: new prices, new plans, promotions.
• Pages added or removed: a new service, an industry page, a new location.
• Job postings: often the best indicator of strategy (hiring salespeople in a new region, a particular technical profile).
• Press mentions: funding rounds, partnerships, appointments.
• Public customer reviews, when accessible: recurring themes of satisfaction or complaint.

Every week, it compares with the previous week and only delivers the differences. That's where all the value lies: you don't need to know what your competitor does, but what it has changed.

The report format#

The Competitive monitoring template produces a two-to-four-page PDF report, sent every Monday at 8 a.m. A lighter variant, Competitor website changes, sends just the list of changes detected, without analysis.

A well-built report follows this structure:

1. In one sentence: the most important change of the week.
2. By competitor: what changed, with the date and source.
3. What it might mean: a cautious hypothesis, clearly presented as such.
4. To check: ambiguous points that deserve a look from you.

Sample brief#

Every Monday at 8 a.m., monitor my four competitors' websites: [names and URLs]. Look at their pricing pages, new pages, job postings on their site and on LinkedIn, and their press mentions this week. Compare with the previous week and send me a PDF report: first the most important change, then the details by competitor with the source. Present any interpretation as a hypothesis. If a competitor hasn't changed anything, one line is enough.

Scenario: monitoring for a software vendor serving tradespeople#

A small company publishes quoting and invoicing software for construction tradespeople. It sets up two agents.

The press review agent sends three sections every morning: regulation (e-invoicing, renovation grants), market (construction activity, insolvencies and new businesses), competitors (public announcements). Most days, only one or two lines are genuinely new.

The competitive monitoring agent tracks five vendors. One Monday, it flags that a competitor has added a page dedicated to roofers and posted two field sales jobs in the West. It notes that this could signal a regional sales push, to be confirmed. The team decides to reach out earlier to its own roofing clients in that region.

None of this information was secret. It was just scattered, and nobody had time to pull it together every week.

Real-time alerts: when a week is too long#

Some information can't wait until Monday: a mention of your brand in a negative article, a scathing customer review, a tender that closes in ten days. For these cases, use an agent that runs several times a day and only writes when it finds something:

• Brand mention alerts: new mentions of your brand on the web and Reddit, with their tone, sent to Slack.
• Tender finder: public tenders that match your business, as soon as they're published.
• Regulatory monitoring: new texts that affect your trade.

Sharing monitoring with the team#

Monitoring read by a single person loses part of its value. Three simple options:

• A dedicated channel (Slack, Teams) where the agent posts each review: everyone reads what concerns them.
• A shared table where the agent records each item with its date, source and topic. It becomes a searchable base, and other agents can use it: for example, an agent that prepares your social media posts from the news it spotted. That's the idea behind the Monitoring, writing and publishing chain.
• Shared memory: important facts retained by the monitoring agent are visible to the other agents in your account, so you don't have to repeat the context to each one.

Limits to be aware of#

• Paywalled content: the agent reads what's publicly accessible. A subscriber-only article will at best appear with its headline and standfirst.
• Closed social networks: private or members-only posts aren't accessible.
• Interpretation: an agent can suggest a reading of a change, but it doesn't know your market better than you do. Hypotheses must be presented as such, and that's a rule to build into its design.

Pricing and getting started#

A daily press review is one of the “Essential” agents, usually around €9 a month; a detailed competitive intelligence report that reads several sites and produces a PDF can sit higher. The exact price is calculated based on complexity and shown before launch. See the pricing page for plans and included agents.

To get started, open one of the templates below or describe your need directly in the chat. If you work in a regulated industry, the legal use cases page shows other examples of specialized monitoring.