New-competitor radar → weekly Slack digest

The problem this solves

New competitors rarely announce themselves to you. They show up in the places buyers look: a new domain climbing your money keywords, unfamiliar ads running against your category terms, a name you have never heard cited in a deal. By the time a newcomer is visible in your win-loss notes, they have usually been ranking and advertising for months. Watching for them manually means re-running the same searches and library checks week after week, which is exactly the kind of vigilance that erodes.

The cost of late detection compounds: pricing pressure you did not see forming, a differentiator that suddenly needs defending, a segment quietly contested. Early detection is cheap by comparison - a weekly sweep of the demand surfaces you care about, with each new name profiled enough to judge whether it is a real threat or noise. That judgment is the entire product of a radar; a list of domains without context is just more work.

How the mission runs

1. Define the tripwires. You give the mission your top ten money keywords and category terms. These are the tripwires: any domain that starts ranking on them or advertising against them is, by definition, competing for your demand, whatever its own website says it does.
2. Sweep the search surface. SERP checks current rankings for every tripwire keyword, and Keyword Intelligence compares against previous runs to isolate domains that are new or moving sharply. Established players you already track are filtered out, so the radar only surfaces genuine newcomers and meaningful movers.
3. Sweep the ad surface. Ad Libraries searches for active ads mentioning your category terms and flags advertisers that have never appeared before. Paid entry often precedes organic visibility by months, which makes this sweep the earlier of the two warning systems in most categories.
4. Profile each newcomer. For every new name, Firmographics builds a quick dossier: size, funding, age, and market focus. The agent scores threat level - a funded team aimed at your segment reads differently from a content site skimming traffic - and explains its reasoning in one paragraph.
5. Post the weekly digest. The radar lands in your chosen Slack channel: newcomers this week with their profiles and threat scores, movement among previously flagged names, and an all-quiet note when nothing surfaced. With approvals on, the digest waits in your queue before posting to the channel.

The prompt

This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.

What comes back

A weekly digest in the Slack channel you name: each new competitor with a firmographic profile, the tripwire that caught them, an evidence-linked threat assessment, and updates on names flagged in earlier weeks. Quiet weeks post a short all-clear so the team knows the radar ran. The accumulated history gives you a dated record of when each rival first appeared on your demand surfaces.

Make it yours

• Widen the tripwire list with adjacent-category terms to catch companies expanding toward your market before they ever touch your core keywords.
• Lower the detection threshold to include domains newly reaching page two of results, accepting a little noise in exchange for weeks of additional early warning.
• Ask the agent to route any high-threat detection to a separate leadership channel the moment it is found, while the routine weekly digest continues in the team channel.

Frequently asked questions

Go deeper

• Competitive intelligence with AI agents: the complete guide
• Tracking competitor hiring and funding: strategy in public
• Share of voice across channels: one scoreboard for the category
• Use case: competitor teardowns on a schedule