25 Questions Your AI Competitive Intelligence Analyst Should Answer

TL;DR: Most CI alerts tell you a page changed. They don't tell you what to do before the 9am standup. This post organizes 25 specific questions by stakeholder role, with example outputs showing what a real answer looks like. If your current setup can't answer these cold, you're running monitoring, not intelligence.

It's 8:47am. You're head of product at a 60-person SaaS company. A Slack ping lands: "Competitor pricing page changed." That's it. No context, no score, no recommended action.

Your standup starts in 13 minutes. Your VP of Sales is in that meeting and she's going to ask you what it means.

This is where most CI setups fail. They get you the alert. They don't get you the answer. What follows is a field guide for getting the answer, organized by the role asking it and the urgency driving it.

Why most CI alerts fail the 9am standup test

There's a clean line between monitoring and intelligence. Monitoring tells you a page changed. Intelligence tells you what it signals and what to do before the meeting starts.

The distinction sounds simple, but almost no existing resource actually operationalizes it. Most CI guides, including well-cited ones from Oktopost and Veridion, explain the benefits of CI at a category level. They don't give you a question framework for real-time decisions. That's the gap this post fills.

The output format that actually works in a live team context is: one summary, one reason, one action. Not a feed of changes. Not a log. One summary of what happened, one reason it matters to your position, one action to take before Friday. GTM teams consume information in decisions, not in data streams.

Before a question is even worth asking, noise has to be filtered out. The changes that shouldn't reach your inbox include:

Cookie banner copy tweaks
Footer copyright year updates
A/B test variant swaps on hero images
Image compression changes
Tracking pixel additions

SpyGlow's change scoring runs 1 to 10. That means by the time a question lands in your queue, the system has already decided it's worth your attention.

The changes that do reach you look more like this: pricing dropped 17%, a new enterprise tier appeared, a VP of Sales was hired from a named competitor. Those are the inputs that justify a question.

How to think about the 25 questions

The 25 questions below are organized into four stakeholder lanes, because the "so what" threshold is different for each role.

A sales rep needs an answer before a call that starts in 20 minutes. A PMM needs it before a campaign ships next Tuesday. A product lead needs it before sprint planning on Monday morning. A founder or GTM lead needs a portfolio view before the weekly leadership sync.

There are also three question types worth distinguishing:

Point-in-time: "What changed yesterday?"
Trend: "What's shifted over the past 90 days?"
Composite: "What does pricing + hiring + messaging together signal?"

Composite questions are the highest-value type. They're also the ones no single-surface alerting tool can answer, because they require correlating signals across multiple data streams simultaneously. A pricing change alone is mildly interesting. A pricing change coinciding with a new enterprise case study and a wave of enterprise sales hires is a positioning shift you need to respond to.

Teams tracking three to ten competitor domains also need questions that work across brands, not just for a single flagship product. The Monday brief format handles leadership-tier questions across the full portfolio.

A symmetrical grid of eight geometric icon cards pairing four stakeholder roles with their corresponding question types.

Questions 1-7: what sales and AEs need before a live deal

These seven questions need sourced answers quickly. If your setup makes a rep wait longer, they'll skip the question and wing the call.

1. "What has [competitor] changed on their pricing page in the last 30 days?" A rep walking into a price-sensitive deal needs to know if the competitor just dropped their entry tier, added a free plan, or restructured annual vs. monthly. This is a point-in-time question with immediate talk track implications.

2. "Do they have a case study targeting [prospect's industry]?" If a prospect in manufacturing is being pitched by a competitor who just published a manufacturing case study, the rep needs to know that before the call, not during it.

3. "What objections are their customers raising publicly right now?" Public review sites, forums, and community threads surface real friction. A rep who knows a competitor's customers are complaining about implementation time can pre-empt that objection.

4. "Has their messaging shifted toward or away from our ICP?" If a competitor spent Q1 chasing enterprise and just pivoted their homepage back toward mid-market, that's a signal about where they see growth, and where they're about to compete harder.

5. "What's their current free trial or PLG motion?" Free trial length, credit card requirements, and onboarding flows change. A rep who doesn't know the competitor now offers a 30-day no-card trial is walking into a conversation they're not ready for.

6. "Did they announce anything this week that a prospect might bring up?" A funding round, a new integration, a product launch. The prospect may have seen it before the rep did.

7. "What's the one thing their sales team says about us?" This is the hardest question to answer and the most valuable one. It requires pulling from review sites, community posts, and any public sales content the competitor has published. The answer directly informs how to open a competitive call.

The interface that handles these is a natural-language query against the full tracked history of a competitor's changes. AskGlow is built for exactly this: ask the question in plain English, get a sourced answer with the relevant change scored and timestamped.

The signal that changes a rep's positioning in a live deal: "VP Sales hired from Acme." That's not a quarterly battle card update. That's a same-day positioning adjustment.

Questions 8-15: what marketing and PMMs need before a campaign ships

PMMs operate on a longer clock than AEs, but the stakes are higher when they get it wrong. A campaign built on stale competitor positioning wastes budget and signals to prospects that you're not paying attention.

8. "How has [competitor]'s homepage headline changed in the last 60 days?" Headline changes signal repositioning. Two changes in 60 days signal testing. Three changes in 60 days signal they haven't found their message yet, which is an opening.

9. "Which keywords are they now ranking for that they weren't 90 days ago?" New keyword territory reveals where they're investing content resources, which is often a leading indicator of where they plan to compete.

10. "Have they launched a new use-case page targeting our segment?" A new use-case page is a deliberate product marketing move. If it targets your segment, the PMM needs to know before the next campaign brief is written.

11. "What's their current differentiator claim against us specifically?" This requires pulling their comparison pages, their "vs." pages if they have them, and any positioning language on their pricing page. It's the question that feeds the counter-claim section of a battle card.

12. "Did they publish a case study in [vertical] this month?" Case studies signal where they're closing. A manufacturing case study means they have a reference customer there. That changes how you compete in that vertical.

13. "Are they running ads against our brand terms right now?" This is a point-in-time question with immediate budget implications. If they just started bidding on your brand, you need to know within hours, not days.

14. "What's their current trial-to-paid messaging sequence?" If they've changed their nurture sequence, it suggests they've found a conversion approach that's working. Worth knowing before you finalize your own onboarding flow.

15. "Which of their blog posts are getting traction in our target audience?" Content performance data surfaces where they're winning organic attention in your segment. If a piece is gaining, your content team needs to know.

These eight questions require trend-type answers. A single alert doesn't cut it. The answers feed directly into the messaging section of a battle card, which should update automatically when a competitor's positioning shifts rather than waiting for a quarterly review.

Two stacked rectangular panels connected by an arrow representing a competitor claim and its counter-claim with a source timestamp below.

Questions 16-21: what product leads need before sprint planning

Product leads operate on a two-week sprint cycle. These six questions belong at the start of each one.

16. "What features did [competitor] ship or announce in the last two weeks?" Changelog entries, release notes, and product announcement posts. The question is whether anything they shipped overlaps with your current sprint or your next one.

17. "Have they updated their API docs or developer-facing pages?" API doc updates are a signal, not a footnote. When a competitor rewrites their developer documentation, they're usually preparing for a developer-facing GTM push.

18. "Did their changelog or release notes mention anything in our roadmap territory?" This is where knowing their roadmap language matters. If they shipped a feature your team has been debating for two quarters, the priority conversation just changed.

19. "Are they hiring for roles that signal a new product direction?" A cluster of ML engineer job postings is a product signal. A wave of enterprise implementation consultant postings is a go-to-market signal. Hiring patterns are one of the most reliable early indicators of where a competitor is heading.

20. "What are their customers asking for publicly that they haven't shipped yet?" Public feature request threads, review site commentary, and community posts surface unmet demand. That's your opportunity.

21. "Has their pricing structure changed in a way that suggests a new tier or packaging shift?" New tiers signal new segments they're targeting. A packaging change often precedes a positioning shift by 60 to 90 days.

This is where composite signals earn their value. API docs rewritten plus a cluster of developer-focused job postings plus a new API-focused pricing tier together signal a platform play. Each signal alone is a moderate signal. Together they form a stronger composite signal. SpyGlow's 9 AI agents and 24 CI tools are built to correlate across these surfaces simultaneously, which is what makes composite detection possible without a human analyst manually connecting the dots.

Questions 22-25: what founders and GTM leads need in the Monday brief

Leadership questions are different in kind, not just in scope. They require portfolio-level synthesis across all tracked brands, not a per-competitor point-in-time update.

22. "Which of our tracked competitors made a move this week that changes our positioning?" Not "what changed." What, of everything that changed, actually requires us to respond. That filter is the whole job.

23. "Are any of our competitors testing messaging on a sister brand before rolling it to their flagship?" This is the question that single-brand CI tools can't answer. Competitors with multiple products often test positioning language on a smaller brand before committing to it at the flagship level. If you're only watching the flagship, you're seeing the move six weeks late.

24. "Which competitor had the highest-severity week and what does it mean for our next 30 days?" Not a list of changes. A ranked summary with a forward-looking implication. The answer to this question is what a founder actually needs at the start of a leadership sync.

25. "Across all our tracked domains, what's the one thing we should act on before Friday?" One thing. Not ten. The discipline of the question forces the platform to prioritize, which is what separates a useful weekly brief from a log dump.

These questions are why SpyGlow's multi-brand architecture matters. Up to 10 domains per account, each with its own workspace, competitors, and tracked history. SpyGlow is built for multi-brand teams, which makes question 23 structurally unanswerable on single-brand setups. The Monday brief pulls across all tracked domains and delivers the synthesis before the leadership sync.

The concrete pattern this surfaces: "Closed Series B funding, medium severity, watch for hiring surge." A funding round at one competitor is interesting. The same pattern appearing at two of your tracked competitors in the same quarter is a market signal worth discussing at the leadership level.

A vertical card with three competitor rows each showing an avatar, a summary bar, and a severity indicator representing a weekly Monday brief.

How to get these answers without a full-time analyst

The practical setup takes five minutes. First answer comes back in under 60 seconds. Change scoring filters out noise before you ask a single question, so you're not wading through cookie banner updates before you get to the pricing change that matters.

The free plan covers two competitors and one domain. That's enough for a founder to get questions 1 through 7 answered for $0, permanently. The Pro plan at $49/month covers three domains and checks twice daily. The Growth plan at $124/month billed annually covers five domains and checks every six hours. The Teams plan at $249/month billed annually covers 10 domains and checks every three hours.

The workflow runs like this: SpyGlow detects a change, delivers it to Slack and webhooks, and flags it with a severity score, summary, and recommended action. Then AskGlow handles the follow-up questions against the full history of that competitor's changes, in plain English, with sources.

A monitoring tool gives you a ping. An AI analyst gives you the answer to question 25 before anyone asks it.

FAQ

What if a competitor's change scores below 5 but I still want to ask about it?

You can query AskGlow against the full change history regardless of severity score. The scoring system determines what triggers an automatic alert, not what you can ask about. If you want to dig into a low-scoring change because context suggests it matters, the full history is there.

Can the same question framework work if we're tracking competitors across two different product lines?

Yes, and that's the scenario the multi-brand architecture is built for. Each domain gets its own workspace and competitor set, so a question about product line A's competitor doesn't get mixed with product line B's data. The Monday brief pulls across all domains, so leadership gets the portfolio view without manually reconciling separate reports.

How often does the platform update the data behind these answers?

It depends on your plan. Free checks daily. Pro checks twice daily. Growth checks every six hours. Teams checks every three hours. For the sales questions (1-7), the six-hour cadence on Growth is usually sufficient. For the leadership questions (22-25), the Monday brief cadences to the weekly rhythm regardless of plan.

What if I ask a question and the competitor hasn't been tracked long enough to have a 90-day history?

You'll get answers based on whatever history exists for that domain. The platform flags when the history window is shorter than the question implies, so you're not getting a fabricated trend from incomplete data. For new competitor additions, the first two to four weeks are point-in-time answers only.

How do composite signal questions actually work in practice? Does the platform auto-detect them or do I have to ask?

Both. The 9 AI agents run continuously and surface composite patterns as severity events without you asking. But you can also ask AskGlow a composite question directly, "what does the combination of their pricing change and new enterprise hiring signal?", and it will correlate across tracked surfaces to build the answer. The automatic detection catches the patterns you didn't think to ask about.

Sources

If the 9am standup scenario from the top of this post sounds familiar, start with questions 1 through 7. Set up two competitors on SpyGlow's free plan, let the change scoring run for a week, and ask AskGlow one of those questions before your next sales call. The gap between what you get back and what a monitoring alert would have told you is the whole argument. Start free at SpyGlow, no credit card needed.