The 30-Minute Competitor Teardown I Run in Perplexity Every Quarter
One prompt chain turns Perplexity into a competitive analyst: positioning, pricing moves, and the gaps nobody is covering.
Every quarter I run the same thirty-minute teardown on my three closest competitors, entirely inside Perplexity, and it has replaced both the hired report and the guilt of never getting to it. The trick is running it as a prompt chain, not a single ask.
Prompt one is positioning: 'How does [competitor] describe itself on its site, in ads, and in recent press, and how has that changed this quarter?' The change detection is the valuable part; repositioning shows up in marketing months before it shows up in product.
Prompt two is pricing and packaging: current plans, what moved, and any enterprise motion appearing. Ask for sources, then click the two most load-bearing ones. Pricing pages change silently and Perplexity's citations tell you whether you are looking at this week's version or last year's cached summary.
Prompt three is my favorite: 'What are customers complaining about in recent reviews and forum threads, and what do they praise unprompted?' Complaint clusters are your roadmap inputs, and unprompted praise tells you what their marketing will double down on next quarter.
The output goes into a single doc with the date stamped, because the comparison across quarters is where the compounding is. Thirty minutes, three prompts, and you know more about your competitive lane than most of the competitors know about theirs.