New competitor detection

Why it matters

Your most valuable searches are the ones where a customer is ready to buy or book: your product type plus a location, a specific service, or a comparison. Whoever appears there, paid or organic, is competing for your customers, whether or not you think of them as a rival. A new name showing up repeatedly is an early sign worth taking seriously.

The competitor ad watch loop is in build and not on sale. When it ships it will track the paid keywords rivals bid on and the advertisers it finds. Until then, a monthly check of your money searches by hand finds the newcomers, and the competitors tool helps you shortlist who to compare.

What you need

• - A list of ten to twenty money searches: the phrases a ready-to-buy customer types
• - A private or logged-out browser window, set to the locations you serve
• - The Google Ads Transparency Center, to check any unfamiliar advertiser
• - Your current list of known rivals

Setup

1. Write down your money searches. For service firms, include your service plus each town you cover.
2. Run each search in a private window and record every business on the first page, noting which are ads and which are organic results. Never click the ads; reading them is enough.
3. For any unfamiliar advertiser, look them up in the Google Ads Transparency Center to see what else they run and where.
4. Paste this month's results, last month's results and your known rivals into the prompt below.
5. Add any newcomer the model flags as serious to your watch list and to your other recipes.

The prompt

Paste this into any capable model, followed by the evidence you gathered in the setup.

You are helping a UK business spot new competitors on its most valuable searches.
Below are: our list of known rivals; this month's results (search phrase, location, business name, position, ad or organic, the ad or result text); and last month's results in the same format, if we have them.
Do this:
1. List every business that appears this month and did not appear last month, or is not on our known rivals list. Quote the result or ad text that shows each.
2. For each newcomer, count how many of our searches it appears on and whether it appears as an ad, organically, or both.
3. Write a short profile of each newcomer from the evidence: what they seem to offer and what their ad or result promises.
4. Judge each newcomer as watch closely, keep an eye on, or ignore, with the reason. Mark any view of their strategy as a hypothesis.
5. Rate the effort (low/medium/high) and likely impact (low/medium/high) of adding each one to our regular comparisons.
Rules:
- Quote the evidence for every point, word for word, and say where it came from (which rival, which page or ad, which date I captured it).
- Label each point OBSERVATION (you can see it in the evidence) or HYPOTHESIS (your reading of why). Never present a hypothesis as a proven cause.
- Never invent a figure, a date, a price or a result. If the evidence does not show it, write "not in the evidence".
- Use British English and plain words.

Known rivals and results:
[paste here]

Doing it by hand today

Run the check at the start of each month, from the same locations each time. Results vary by place and person, so keep the method fixed and read trends rather than single results.

Never click a rival's ad to investigate it. It costs them money and adds nothing; the Google Ads Transparency Center lets you search an advertiser and see their ads filtered by date and location.

When a newcomer makes your watch list, run them through the Intel loop comparison alongside your existing rivals to see how their site measures up.