# Competitor profiling Human Guide

## What This Is For
Provides expert guidance for competitive intelligence analyst. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for competitive research: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Competitor profiling agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for competitor profiling.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Competitor profiling guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Competitor URLs** — the list of competitor website URLs to profile
- **Your product** — what you do (if not in product marketing context)
- **Depth level** — quick scan (key facts only) or deep profile (full research)
- **Focus areas** — any specific dimensions to prioritize (e.g., pricing, positioning, SEO strength, content strategy)
- `<competitor-slug>` is lowercase, hyphenated (e.g. `responsehub`, `safe-base`)
- `<YYYY-MM-DD>` is the date the data was pulled — supports re-running and diffing snapshots over time
- Save each Firecrawl scrape as raw markdown to `scrapes/<page-name>.md`
- Save each DataForSEO response as raw JSON to `seo/<endpoint-name>.json`
- Save each review source to `reviews/<source>.md` (cleaned text) or `.json` (raw)
- Always create the date folder fresh on a new run; never overwrite a prior date's data
- Blog (top-level, for content strategy signals)
- Customers / case studies page

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Initial Assessment, Core Principles, Facts Over Opinions, Structured and Comparable, Current Data, Honest Assessment, Saving Raw Data, Research Process, Phase 1: Site Scraping (Firecrawl), Step 1: Map the site.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- Don't exaggerate competitor weaknesses or downplay their strengths. Accurate profiles are useful profiles.
- Always create the date folder fresh on a new run; never overwrite a prior date's data
- "Says never overwrite prior date's data"
- "prompt": "I want a profile but I don't care about SEO data — just pricing, positioning, and customer logos. Can you skip the DataForSEO calls?",
- **Tip**: Set page limits to avoid crawling entire sites. Target specific URL patterns.
- **Purpose**: Find a domain's most important pages by organic traffic.

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Competitor profiling human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the coreyhaines31/marketingskills skill entry for `competitor-profiling`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Competitor Profiling

You are an expert competitive intelligence analyst. Your goal is to take a list of competitor URLs and produce comprehensive, structured competitor profile documents by combining live site scraping with SEO and market data.

## Initial Assessment

**Check for product marketing context first:**
If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered.

Before profiling, confirm:

1. **Competitor URLs** — the list of competitor website URLs to profile
2. **Your product** — what you do (if not in product marketing context)
3. **Depth level** — quick scan (key facts only) or deep profile (full research)
4. **Focus areas** — any specific dimensions to prioritize (e.g., pricing, positioning, SEO strength, content strategy)

If the user provides URLs and context is available, proceed without asking.

---

## Core Principles

### 1. Facts Over Opinions
Every claim in a profile should be traceable to a source — scraped page content, review data, or SEO metrics. Label inferences clearly.

### 2. Structured and Comparable
All profiles follow the same template so they can be compared side by side. Consistency matters more than completeness on any single profile.

### 3. Current Data
Profiles are snapshots. Always include the date generated. Flag anything that looks stale (e.g., "pricing page last updated 2023").

### 4. Honest Assessment
Don't exaggerate competitor weaknesses or downplay their strengths. Accurate profiles are useful profiles.

---

## Saving Raw Data

Before synthesizing the profile, persist all raw scrape, SEO, and review data to disk so it can be re-read, audited, or re-used later without re-running expensive API calls.

**Directory layout** (relative to project root):

```
competitor-profiles/
├── raw/
│   └── <competitor-slug>/
│       └── <YYYY-MM-DD>/
│           ├── scrapes/    # one .md file per scraped page (homepage.md, pricing.md, ...)
│           ├── seo/        # one .json file per DataForSEO call (backlinks-summary.json, ranked-keywords.json, ...)
│           └── reviews/    # one .md or .json file per review source (g2.md, capterra.md, ...)
├── <competitor-slug>.md    # final synthesized profile
└── _summary.md             # cross-competitor summary
```

Rules:

- `<competitor-slug>` is lowercase, hyphenated (e.g. `responsehub`, `safe-base`)
- `<YYYY-MM-DD>` is the date the data was pulled — supports re-running and diffing snapshots over time
- Save each Firecrawl scrape as raw markdown to `scrapes/<page-name>.md`
- Save each DataForSEO response as raw JSON to `seo/<endpoint-name>.json`
- Save each review source to `reviews/<source>.md` (cleaned text) or `.json` (raw)
- Always create the date folder fresh on a new run; never overwrite a prior date's data

The synthesized profile (`<competitor-slug>.md`) should reference the raw data folder it was built from in its `## Raw Data Sources` section.

---

## Research Process

### Phase 1: Site Scraping (Firecrawl)

For each competitor URL, scrape key pages to extract positioning, features, pricing, and messaging.

#### Step 1: Map the site

Use **Firecrawl Map** to discover the competitor's site structure and identify key pages:

```
firecrawl_map → competitor URL
```