How to monitor your competitors without spending hours on research

If you manage an accountancy practice, law firm, or consulting business, you probably have a reasonable sense of who your competitors are. You see them at networking events, hear about them from clients, and occasionally lose a pitch to them. But knowing who they are and knowing what they are doing are very different things.

Most small firm principals admit they do not monitor competitors in any structured way. It is always on the list, but it never rises above the daily firefighting. The result is that strategic decisions — pricing, service mix, hiring, positioning — are made on gut feel rather than evidence.

Why competitor intelligence matters for small firms

Large firms employ dedicated business development teams and strategy consultants to keep track of the competitive landscape. Small firms have always been at a disadvantage here. But the information gap has consequences that are easy to underestimate.

Pricing blind spots. If your competitors have significantly undercut your fees — or raised theirs — you need to know. Firms that price in a vacuum either leave money on the table or lose pitches they should have won. Competitors filing accounts at Companies House, updating their websites with new service offerings, or advertising roles that signal expansion all provide pricing intelligence if you know where to look.

Service gap opportunities. When a local competitor stops offering a particular service, or when a new entrant starts targeting a niche you serve, these are signals that directly affect your pipeline. Most firms only discover these shifts months after they happen, by which time the opportunity has passed.

Talent market signals. Competitor hiring activity tells you about their growth trajectory, their capacity constraints, and the skills they are investing in. If a rival is recruiting heavily for tax advisory roles, that tells you something about where they see demand shifting.

The traditional approach does not scale

The way most firms approach competitor monitoring today is entirely manual. A partner might occasionally check a rival's website, read a trade publication, or hear something through the grapevine. Some firms set up Google Alerts, which produce a flood of irrelevant results that nobody has time to filter.

The core problem is that useful competitive intelligence is scattered across dozens of sources: Companies House filings, LinkedIn activity, job boards, industry publications, regulatory announcements, website changes, social media, review sites, and more. No single person can monitor all of these consistently, and asking a junior to do it manually produces inconsistent results at best.

What an automated approach looks like

The most effective competitor monitoring combines automated data collection with intelligent filtering. Rather than trying to read everything, you define the competitors and topics you care about, and let technology surface only the changes that matter.

A well-configured monitoring system will track Companies House filings for your named competitors, detect changes to their websites, flag new job postings, and surface relevant mentions in industry publications. The key is not just collecting the data but synthesising it into a brief you can actually act on — a concise weekly or monthly intelligence report rather than a raw data dump.

This is exactly the kind of task where AI excels. Pattern recognition across multiple data sources, filtering noise from signal, and producing structured summaries are capabilities that have improved dramatically in the past two years. What used to require a research analyst can now be done automatically, at a fraction of the cost.

Turning intelligence into action

Raw data is only valuable if it leads to decisions. The firms that benefit most from competitive intelligence are the ones that build it into their regular management rhythm. A monthly strategy meeting that includes a competitor briefing section is far more effective than ad-hoc checks when something goes wrong.

Some practical actions that flow from good competitor intelligence: adjusting your fee benchmarks based on market positioning, targeting service areas where competitors are retreating, timing business development pushes to coincide with competitor disruption (such as a key person departure), and refining your pitch deck with up-to-date differentiators.

Services like GhostBrief are emerging to address exactly this need — delivering automated competitive intelligence reports tailored to professional services firms. Rather than building your own monitoring stack, you receive a structured briefing covering the competitors and topics you define, with no manual research required.

Getting started

You do not need to build a sophisticated intelligence operation overnight. Start with a shortlist of five to ten competitors you most frequently encounter in pitches or lose clients to. Define the questions you want answered: are they growing, what services are they pushing, how are they pricing, are they hiring or contracting?

Whether you automate the monitoring or assign it to someone internally, the discipline of regularly reviewing competitive intelligence will sharpen your strategic thinking and give you an edge that most small firms simply do not have. In a market where differentiation is difficult, being better informed than your competitors is one of the few sustainable advantages available.