Healthy competition has always been at the heart of free markets. Likewise, as we have seen a shift toward digitalization, and online information increases, business competition is now all about intelligence.
Companies that know most about their competitors and markets, in general, immediately gain a competitive advantage and increase their chances of outperforming their competitors.
Likewise, competitive intelligence is, of course, acquired through gathering data. The data most commonly used to generate accurate competitive insight comes from public web data sources.
In this article, you will learn about competitive intelligence best practices, data sources, types of competitive research, tools, and more.
What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the practice of gathering and analyzing information about competitors, customers, and general market conditions.
Competitive intelligence aims to improve one’s market understanding which can be translated into building a competitive strategy.
Such a competitive edge means that companies leveraging competitive intelligence to make decisions improve their ability to get ahead of the competition and solidify their market position.
This type of information gathering and usage is also sometimes called corporate intelligence and is related but not synonymous with business intelligence.
Business intelligence is a broader term that generally includes various tools, software, strategies, and more, to help improve the quality and quantity of information relevant to making data-driven business decisions.
Competitive intelligence can be considered a type of market research but with very targeted questions to answer. Its goal is to find any information and uncover unique insights that will help the company stand its ground against the competition.
How Different Departments Use Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence research types
Competitive intelligence can be categorized into two main types based on its scope and application—strategic and tactical. Each plays a vital role in how a business plans and executes its market positioning and competitive strategy.
Strategic CI (strategic intelligence)
Strategic competitive intelligence focuses on supporting long-term business goals. It offers a macro view of the market and competitors, aiding decisions like expansion, product innovation, or market diversification. According to Investopedia, this includes tracking mergers and acquisitions, evaluating new market opportunities, and analyzing long-term trends in consumer behavior and technology adoption.
Use cases include:
- Identifying potential markets for expansion based on competitor job growth and global hiring trends
- Analyzing long-term technology trends and competitor adoption patterns using technographic data
- Assessing strategic partnerships and acquisitions in your industry
Tactical CI (tactical intelligence)
Tactical CI is geared toward short-term needs, helping teams react to competitors’ immediate actions. It’s commonly used by sales and marketing teams for real-time insights. Investopedia notes that tactical intelligence includes data points like pricing changes, product feature updates, or campaign launches.
Use cases include:
- Monitoring competitors’ job postings for engineering roles to anticipate product releases
- Tracking marketing roles to detect new campaign efforts or target shifts
- Creating up-to-date battlecards based on hiring for roles in customer success or business development
Integrating Both Approaches
For optimal results, businesses should integrate both strategic and tactical CI. Strategic CI sets the foundation, while tactical CI delivers real-time insights that fine-tune execution. By using platforms like CoreSignal, companies can continuously gather public web data to feed both strategic forecasting and tactical decision-making pipelines.. The most effective programs integrate both to enable real-time agility and long-term resilience.
Industrial espionage
While competitive intelligence represents the legal and fair side of business competition through information analysis, on the other side, we have industrial espionage.
This term refers to such illegal and unethical practices as sending spies to be hired by competitors or buying information from former workers.
Responsible supervisors should ensure that there are no departments or individuals in the company resorting to such unethical means of gaining an advantage and protecting themselves from outside threats.
Such protection may include legal means of drafting non-disclosure agreements, taking care of data security, and carefully screening recruits, especially for data-sensitive positions.
Key components of competitive Intelligence
Market Intelligence
Understanding broader market trends, emerging technologies, and macroeconomic shifts that influence your industry.
Competitor Profiling
In-depth analysis of competitors' business models, revenue, partnerships, funding rounds, and leadership changes.
Product Tracking & Feature Benchmarking
Monitoring competitors’ product updates, release cycles, pricing changes, and positioning.
Customer Sentiment & Perception Analysis
Collecting data from public reviews, forums, and social media to gauge customer satisfaction and unmet needs.
Internal vs. External Intelligence Sources
Internal sources include CRM data, win/loss analysis, and employee feedback.External sources include public web data (e.g., job postings, reviews, investor reports), third-party databases, and scraping tools.
How to build a competitive intelligence process?
There are many types of information that are used for competitive intelligence.
Along with the better-known types of intelligence from the usual sources, now we have enormous volumes of public web data that greatly boost the quality and usability of intelligence.
Some competitive intelligence examples are listed below.
1. Set your CI goals
Start by defining the specific outcomes you aim to achieve. Are you looking to:
- Track competitors’ strategic moves?
- Identify market entry opportunities?
- Monitor emerging threats or innovations?
- Support sales teams with timely insights?
Clarity on goals helps you focus your resources and avoid information overload.
2. Identify Key Intelligence Areas
- Company profile: use firmographic data (e.g., size, revenue, employee count) to benchmark competitors and understand their market positioning. This helps in segmenting rivals and spotting fast-growing disruptors.
- Technology stack: technographic data reveals what tools and platforms your competitors rely on. Knowing their CRM, eCommerce, or analytics solutions uncovers strengths, vulnerabilities, and innovation gaps.
- Product offering: compare features, pricing tiers, positioning statements, and customer pain points. This uncovers whitespace opportunities and informs product development or differentiation strategies.
- Marketing & strategy: examine SEO tactics, paid campaigns, thought leadership content, partnerships, and acquisitions. This paints a picture of strategic intent and marketing aggressiveness.
- Customer sentiment: monitor social media platforms, review sites, and forums to extract qualitative feedback on competitor products and services. Pay attention to recurring complaints or praise—these are powerful signals for positioning.
- Market signals: monitor indicators such as job postings, funding rounds, executive hires, and regional expansion. These often reveal early signs of growth, downsizing, or shifting strategic direction.
3. Collect data efficiently
Use public web data as the foundation—scrape company websites, job boards, social platforms, and product pages. Combine this with competitive research platforms (like SimilarWeb, BuiltWith, or SEMrush) and third-party data providers to scale your efforts. Outsourcing to CI specialists or data vendors can accelerate data acquisition while ensuring accuracy.
4. Analyze & contextualize
Raw data alone doesn’t drive decisions. Context is key. Compare competitor metrics against your own benchmarks. Look for strategic gaps, emerging threats, or underexplored opportunities. Visualize trends over time to forecast trajectories and prioritize actions.
5. Share with stakeholders
Insights are only impactful if accessible. Distribute your findings in tailored formats for:
- Marketing: Messaging shifts, competitor campaign strategies
- Sales: Battlecards, objection handling, prospect intelligence
- Product Teams: Feature gaps, roadmap direction
- Leadership: Strategic threats, M&A signals, market trends
Use dashboards, monthly briefs, or collaborative tools like Notion or Confluence for structured visibility.
6. Monitor continuously
Markets shift fast—so must your intelligence. Establish a cadence for updating insights. Automate alerts for key changes (e.g., new funding, tech adoption, leadership moves). Treat CI as a living system, not a one-time report.
Bonus tip
You could also establish competitive intelligence programs within your company, accessible to all teams or key stakeholders, and make sure that everyone is up to speed on a business strategy that would help outperform the competition.
A competitive intelligence program focuses on revealing and analyzing the competitive environment to provide market intelligence and actionable insight.
Best data sources for competitive intelligence
Now that the basic structure of competitive intelligence is clear let’s look at how a competitive intelligence analyst would gather information for it.
As mentioned, public web data sources are vital these days, as the intelligence acquired through them is more versatile and often more revealing.
Below are the key types of data sources for competitive intelligence.
Competitors and other industry sources
The most basic way of data collection about the competitors is as old as business development itself – one can simply do what their clients would do.
That means buying and analyzing their products, subscribing to their news releases, visiting competitors’ websites as well as their shops and other locations that are open to the public.
Additionally, one can gather information through various associations, online and offline conferences, and forums with industry experts.
Simply being part of the community and keeping in touch with other industry professionals is a way of staying informed of what is happening and what matters the most.
Customers
After the competitor companies themselves, the main source of competitive intelligence is the customers.
This means that one should survey the customer base restlessly both online and in person. Additionally, it is always advisable to organize focus groups and get feedback on how your product or advertisements compare to those of the competitor.
Furthermore, public web data from online sources such as social media information or online product reviews are great sources of helpful information.
Data providers
The data used for competitive intelligence is very diverse, and not all companies can get it on their own.
Therefore, it is advisable, and more often than not, necessary that businesses turn to public web data providers to ensure intelligence quality and value.
Such help can come from a reliable third-party public web data source, such as Coresignal. In fact, 69% of companies that used outside help for their competitive intelligence have reported positive results.
Data providers can supplement a company’s data sets with such public web data types as the aforementioned firmographics and technographics, as well as social media data and many more.
These companies employ web scrapping and other methods to gather all relevant information that is available on competitors’ websites and elsewhere online.
Therefore, they’re able to offer much more information than most companies could efficiently get on their own.
Suppliers and partners
Other sources of competitive intelligence are competitors’ suppliers and other partners. One can gather actionable information by looking at the companies that supply materials for the competitor or by their logistic partners.
Knowing what sort of B2B services the competing companies are using will reveal both their current competitive position as well as future intentions.
Such B2B data can also provide insights for better business decisions by revealing which partnerships work and which don’t.
Media and academic research
Finally, another broad category of sources for competitive information is published and visual media, including both popular media and academic research.
For example, data gathered about a firm’s media presence by monitoring mass media outlets is a strong indicator of a competitor’s brand recognition. One should research both positive and negative coverage of competitors and compare it to their own company’s media presence.
Additionally, it is advisable to subscribe to journals that aim to illuminate the current market stance and may contain articles by industry experts touching on competing companies.
Furthermore, academic market research and reports will provide valuable statistics about other firms and case studies that may be a source for a deeper understanding of particular competitors.
Competitive intelligence tools
The effect that data has had on contemporary markets is only comparable to the way business has been affected by advancements in AI-based tools and software programs.
These tools are extremely helpful with competitive intelligence tasks as they are capable of handling large volumes of data efficiently.
They can help both with analysis as well as visualization of the results, ensuring that insights show up clearly and are easy to comprehend.
For starters, there are many free competitive intelligence software tools that can be used for improved competitive intelligence.
For example, Google Alerts or Talkwalker can be used to track online mentions of particular keywords, thus allowing you to know what is said by or about your competitors.
The importance and benefits of competitive intelligence
The importance of competitive intelligence in the business world after the informational revolution is more than clear. Information is an asset, the more of it you have and the better you are able to utilize it, the greatest business success you can expect.
To specify how competitive intelligence gathered with public web data helps companies, here are a few key points about its benefits.
Competitive advantage
It is not hard to guess that the main objective of competitive intelligence is a competitive advantage. The old saying that “knowledge is power” has very practical meaning in the data-driven competitive landscape of today.
Through information analysis, companies know what their competitors are doing and going to do. Additionally, they can learn from their mistakes and adapt their best practices.
Furthermore, correct evaluation of competition allows you to prepare better strategies and increase the ability to go head to head with your competition.
Market insights
Tracking competitors means knowing the particular industry and the market they operate in. Other firms can be generally understood as market variables that one needs to account for when forecasting market conditions and planning for the future.
Thus, competitive intelligence research leads to invaluable market insights that can boost strategic planning at all levels and departments.
Product and marketing research
Gathering competitive intelligence, especially with public web data, also inevitably means marketing and product research.
Thus, by collecting such information, companies also learn about products in the market and how their own product can be improved.
Of course, this information also helps the sales team and gives ideas on how to reach the target audience and showcase the strong features of the product better.
In turn, it can make the sales process more efficient in the future.
Understanding customer sentiment
Competitive intelligence gives insight into customer sentiment both directly through getting information from the consumers and indirectly through looking at what works for the competition.
Thus, knowing your competitor also leads to knowing their existing and prospective customers, which are, of course, also your potential customers.
And with good intelligence, you are better equipped to make sure that they drift towards you and not the competing company.
These are several business intelligence benefits that competitive analysis can offer to you.
Competitive counterintelligence
The value and importance of competitive intelligence are best proven by the sheer scope of its usage in modern business. In 2020, as much as 94% of businesses had been investing in competitive intelligence. This might be the most important business trend you need to know, as it shows how important intelligence is for successful competition.
Additionally, it makes it worthwhile to say a few words about competitive counterintelligence. As previously mentioned, 94% of businesses investing in competitive intelligence suggests that it’s highly likely other companies are also gathering competitive intelligence about your company. To counter these business practices, you can include counterintelligence practices into your overall competitive intelligence strategy.
These practices include the abovementioned measures against industrial espionage. Additionally, one should invest in data security technology and be very careful about what is published on the company’s official websites and social media pages.
Finally, along with researching the competition, you can research yourself to see if something can be found that should not be available externally.
To sum up
To compete successfully and avoid missed business opportunities, companies should prioritize various types of business-related intelligence practices and leverage market research strategies.
This type of business information gathering is drastically improved by public web data, leading to versatile and actionable market insights and helping to stay ahead of the competition.
