The Monday market-and-competitor scan you run in five minutes

A standing prompt that scans your competitors and category for what actually changed in the last week and hands you a one-page brief with source links, every Monday morning.

What you'll have when you're done

A five-minute Monday ritual: you run one saved prompt and get back a bulleted brief of what moved in your market over the past week, competitor launches, pricing changes, funding, notable posts, each with a link you can click to verify. You walk into the week knowing what shifted instead of finding out three weeks late from a customer. It is the manual, you-run-it version of competitor intelligence; the automated cousin runs on a schedule (linked at the end).

You find out about the competitor's price cut three weeks late

Here is the quiet cost of running flat-out: the market moves and you miss it. A competitor drops their price, ships a feature your prospects start asking about, or raises a round that changes the narrative, and you hear about it weeks later, usually from a customer, usually at the worst moment. Not because you are careless, because nobody's job is to watch, and "I'll check on the competition" never survives contact with a Monday. I have been blindsided in a sales call by a competitor's pricing change my prospect knew about and I did not, and there is no good recovery from that in the moment. It does not make you look busy. It makes you look asleep. The fix was never "care more." It was making the watching cost five minutes instead of an afternoon.

A standing prompt plus live web search fixes the "nobody watches" problem for five minutes a week. The model does the scanning you would never get around to, and hands you the signal. The catch is that AI will confidently report stale or invented "news," so this workflow lives or dies on one rule: require source links and spot-check them.

What you need first

• AI with live web access: Claude with a web-search connector, or a research tool like Perplexity.
• A saved prompt listing your 3-5 real competitors, your category, and the terms you care about.
• Five minutes on Monday, ideally before the day gets loud.

Step-by-step

Step 1Write the standing prompt once

Build a reusable prompt with your specifics baked in:

Scan for what changed in the last 7 days for these competitors: [list 3-5].
And in this category: [your space]. Report only genuine, recent changes:
pricing, product launches, funding, leadership moves, notable public posts.
For each item, give a one-line summary and a source link. If you find nothing
real for a competitor, say so. Do not include anything older than 7 days.
Do not speculate.

Save it where you will actually reuse it (a Claude Project, a note, a slash command). One addition pays for itself: give the prompt a line or two on your own positioning ("we win on speed-to-value, we lose on enterprise SSO and price"). Then it can do more than list events, it can flag why each one matters to you, the way the sample brief notes "likely a top-of-funnel land grab." A bare event list is a feed; an event list with implications keyed to your position is intelligence.

Step 2Run it Monday and demand sources

Run the prompt with web search on. The "source link for every item" requirement is doing the heavy lifting, it forces the model to ground each claim in something you can check, and makes the "did it just make this up?" question answerable in one click.

Here is the shape of a good brief, illustrative:

Competitor moves (last 7 days)

• Competitor A launched a free tier (source link). Their first move into freemium, likely a top-of-funnel land grab.
• Competitor B raised a $25M Series C led by [investor] (source). Expect more aggressive hiring and paid spend.
• Competitor C: no real news this week.

Category

• An analyst piece argued the space is consolidating (source); two of the names it lists are you and Competitor A.
• A buyer's thread on pricing transparency drew 400+ comments (source). Sentiment: frustration with seat-based pricing.

That is a brief you can read in ninety seconds and act on. Each line is one claim, one link, one implication, which is the format that survives a busy Monday.

Step 3Spot-check before you act

Open the links for anything that would actually change a decision. Public-web scanning is shallow, it misses private moves and sometimes resurfaces old news as if it were new. Treat the brief as leads to verify, not facts to act on. Thirty seconds of clicking saves you from reacting to a competitor "price cut" that happened last year.

Step 4Route the real signals

A good scan produces action, not just awareness. A competitor's price change goes to your sales team's talk track. A prospect's funding round becomes an outbound hook. A category shift goes into your strategy notes. The brief is the input; routing it is what makes it worth five minutes.

Walk the sample brief above through to action and you can see the difference between reading the news and using it. Competitor A's free tier goes straight to your head of sales as a heads-up ("expect prospects to ask why we don't have a free plan, here's the answer"). Competitor B's raise goes into your hiring watch (they will be poaching) and your fundraising narrative. The pricing-frustration thread is the sharpest signal of all: 400 buyers telling you what they hate about how your category prices, which is a content angle, an outbound hook, and a product-strategy input at once. Five minutes of scanning, four routed actions, none of which you would have had otherwise.

How you'll know it's working

You stop being surprised. The competitor move shows up in your Monday brief, while you can still respond, instead of in a lost-deal post-mortem. You also start sounding sharper in sales conversations, because you actually know what is happening in your space this week.

When it breaks

• It reports old news as new. Tighten the "nothing older than 7 days" constraint and check the source dates. Recency is the most common failure.
• It made something up. No source link, or the link does not say what it claimed. This is why Step 2's source requirement and Step 3's spot-check are mandatory.
• The brief is shallow. Public web only sees so much. For deeper signal on a specific competitor, do a focused manual dig; this scan is for breadth, not depth.
• The link is real but does not say what the brief claimed. The summary drifted from the source. Always open the link for anything decision-changing; a real URL is necessary but not sufficient, the claim has to actually be in it.
• It reports a "launch" that was a blog post or a private beta. The model conflates announcing with shipping. Tell it to note the stage ("announced," "in beta," "generally available") so you do not scramble over a feature that does not exist yet.
• The same item shows up three weeks running. It is re-reporting a standing fact as news. Frame the prompt around "what changed in the last 7 days," and if it persists, paste last week's brief and tell it to report only what is new since then.
• You stop running it. Five minutes still loses to a chaotic Monday. If it keeps slipping, automate it (next link).

Make it yours. Tune the scan to your actual strategic questions, not just "watch competitors." If your live worry is talent, add "notable hires or departures at [competitors]" and "who is hiring aggressively in [our roles]." If it is pricing, point it at pricing pages and buyer sentiment. If you sell into a specific industry, add that industry's regulatory and budget news, because a shift there moves your deals more than a competitor's feature does. The standing prompt is a strategy document in disguise; write it to surface what would actually change your week.

Where this fits in your harness

This is the manual version of market intelligence. When you are ready to stop running it by hand, a competitor-monitoring routine that pings you on real moves does the same scan on a schedule and only alerts you when something genuinely changes. The signals it surfaces feed personalized outbound and your strategic decision pressure-tests.