competitor-analysis

name competitor-analysis description Research competitors with Browserbase discovery, enrichment lanes, screenshots, matrices, and HTML reports. license MIT compatibility Requires the browse CLI (npm install -g browse) and BROWSERBASE_API_KEY env var allowed-tools Bash Agent AskUserQuestion metadata {"author":"browserbase","version":"0.2.0"} category marketing risk safe source official source_repo browserbase/skills source_type official date_added 2026-06-19 author Browserbase license_source https://github.com/browserbase/skills/blob/main/skills/competitor-analysis/LICENSE.txt tags ["competitor-analysis","browserbase","market-research","browser-automation"] tools ["claude-code","codex-cli","cursor"] Competitor Analysis When to Use Use when the user needs structured competitor research with Browserbase discovery, enrichment lanes, screenshots, comparison matrices, and a final HTML report. Source: browserbase/skills (MIT). Analyze a user's competitors. Uses Browserbase Search API for discovery and a 4-lane Plan→Research→Synthesize pattern for enrichment — outputting an HTML report with overview, per-competitor deep dives, a side-by-side feature/pricing matrix, and a chronological mentions feed. Required : BROWSERBASE_API_KEY env var and the browse CLI installed ( npm install -g browse ). First-run setup : On the first run you'll be prompted to approve browse cloud fetch , browse cloud search , cat , mkdir , sed , etc. Select "Yes, and don't ask again for: browse cloud fetch:*" (or equivalent) for each. To permanently approve, add these to your ~/.claude/settings.json under permissions.allow : "Bash(browse:*)" , "Bash(bunx:*)" , "Bash(bun:*)" , "Bash(node:*)" , "Bash(cat:*)" , "Bash(mkdir:*)" , "Bash(sed:*)" , "Bash(head:*)" , "Bash(tr:*)" , "Bash(rm:*)" Path rules : Always use full literal paths in Bash — NOT ~ or $HOME . Resolve the home directory once and use it everywhere. When building subagent prompts, replace {SKILL_DIR} with the full literal path. Output directory : All output goes to ~/Desktop/{company_slug}_competitors_{YYYY-MM-DD}/ . This directory contains one .md file per competitor plus the generated HTML views and CSV. CRITICAL — Tool restrictions (applies to main agent AND all subagents) : All web searches: use browse cloud search . NEVER WebSearch. All page fetches: use browse cloud fetch --allow-redirects (returns markdown by default; add --format raw if you need the original HTML, then pipe through sed ... | tr -s ' \n' to extract text). NEVER WebFetch. 1 MB response limit — fall back to browse get markdown (after browse open <url> --remote ) for JS-heavy pages. All research output: subagents write one markdown file per competitor to {OUTPUT_DIR}/{competitor-slug}.md using bash heredoc. NEVER use the Write tool or python3 -c . See references/example-research.md for the file format. Report compilation: use node {SKILL_DIR}/scripts/compile_report.mjs {OUTPUT_DIR} --user-company "{user_company}" --open — generates index.html , competitors/*.html , matrix.html , mentions.html , results.csv in one step and opens overview. URL deduplication: node {SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list_urls.mjs /tmp --prefix competitor . Subagents must use ONLY the Bash tool. Main agent NEVER reads raw discovery JSON batch files. CRITICAL — Minimize permission prompts : Subagents MUST batch ALL file writes into a SINGLE Bash call using chained heredocs. Batch ALL searches and ALL fetches into single Bash calls via && chaining. Pipeline Overview Follow these 8 steps in order. Do not skip or reorder. User Company Research — Deeply understand the user's company, produce precise_category + category_include_keywords + exclusion_list Depth Mode + Seed Input — Choose depth, accept optional seed competitor URLs Discovery (3 parallel waves) — Wave A (alternatives), Wave B (precise category), Wave C (comparison-page graph via "X vs Y" title parsing) Gate — scripts/gate_candidates.mjs fetches each candidate's hero text (via browse cloud fetch ) and drops wrong-category URLs Confirm enrichment set with the user — Present PASS / UNKNOWN / rejected-brand-matches via AskUserQuestion . User ticks the real ones, adds any the discovery missed. Skipping this step is wasteful because enrichment is expensive (25 subagents × depth budget) and the gate is imperfect (JS-heavy homepages, Cloudflare challenges, semantic-variant taglines) Deep Enrichment (5 subagents per competitor in deep/deeper modes) — Marketing, Discussion, Social, News, Technical — each lane a separate subagent writing to partials/ ; then merge_partials.mjs consolidates. In deep/deeper modes, Step 5d adds a 6th Battle Card synthesis lane AFTER Step 5c fact-check completes — produces per-competitor Landmines / Objection Handlers / Talk Tracks grounded in cited evidence. Screenshots — capture_screenshots.mjs via the browse CLI captures a 1280×800 homepage hero per competitor HTML Report — Overview + per-competitor (with embedded hero screenshot + Battle Card card) + matrix + mentions views Step 0: Setup Output Directory OUTPUT_DIR=~/Desktop/{company_slug}_competitors_{YYYY-MM-DD} mkdir -p " $OUTPUT_DIR " Replace {company_slug} with the user's company name (lowercase, hyphenated) and {YYYY-MM-DD} with today's date. Pass {OUTPUT_DIR} as a full literal path to every subagent. Clean up discovery batch files from prior runs: rm -f /tmp/competitor_discovery_batch_*.json Re-runs must start from a clean $OUTPUT_DIR . compile_report.mjs ingests every {slug}.md in the directory, and merge_partials.mjs only overwrites the slugs in the current set — it never deletes ones dropped from a new enrichment set. Since the directory is keyed by date, a same-day re-run with a different competitor set would leave stale competitors in the overview, matrix, CSV, and screenshots. Either use a fresh directory or clear the prior per-competitor files first: rm -f " $OUTPUT_DIR " /*.md && rm -rf " $OUTPUT_DIR " /partials " $OUTPUT_DIR " /screenshots Step 1: User Company Research This step sets the baseline for what "competitor" means AND produces the verified data the Step 5b matrix will use for the userCompany row. Rule : The user's company gets the same 5-lane research depth as competitors. Do NOT fill userCompany in matrix.json from memory — it will ship false claims to the user's own team. On a search-API run (user company Exa, 2026-04-23), skipping this step produced a matrix that claimed Exa had a "published uptime SLA" (there is no numeric public SLA — only a status page) and marked its MIT-licensed Python SDK as open-source: false (the repo is github.com/exa-labs/exa-py, LICENSE confirmed MIT). Both errors would have surfaced in the "Where you're winning" card as fabricated moats. Process: Ask the user for their company name or URL. Check for an existing profile at {SKILL_DIR}/profiles/{company-slug}.json . If it exists, load it and confirm with the user: "I have your profile from {researched_at}. Still accurate?" — if yes, skip to Step 2 BUT still run the partial-lane enrichment below so matrix synthesis has fresh feature evidence. The profile format is shared with company-research (same shape). If a user already has a profile saved under company-research/profiles/ , you may copy it into this skill's profiles directory rather than re-researching. Run the full 5-lane enrichment on the user's company — identical to the competitor pattern in Step 5. For each lane, spawn a Bash-only subagent that writes to {OUTPUT_DIR}/partials/{user-slug}.{lane}.md : marketing — tagline, positioning, pricing tiers, features, integrations, open-source components (SDK repos + licenses), regions offered, compliance (SOC 2 / HIPAA / trust portal URL) technical — REST + streaming API support (with docs URLs), SDK languages, MCP server URL, neural vs keyword retrieval modes, reranking / highlights / live-crawl specifics, published uptime SLA (actual %, not status page), third-party retrieval-quality benchmarks discussion , social , news — optional in quick mode, recommended in deep+ See references/research-patterns.md → "Self-Research" for sub-questions. Each finding MUST cite a URL. Run merge_partials.mjs on the user's partials too — produces {OUTPUT_DIR}/{user-slug}.md , the canonical source Step 5b reads from for userCompany flags. Synthesize into a profile: Company, Product, Existing Customers, Competitors (seed list), Use Cases, precise_category , category_include_keywords , exclusion_list . Do NOT include ICP — this skill doesn't need it. precise_category : one sentence describing the category. e.g., "AI web search API for agents with neural + keyword retrieval". Avoid vague words like "tools" / "platform". category_include_keywords : 8-15 phrases a direct competitor's marketing would likely contain (hero or title). Include semantic variants. exclusion_list : phrases that indicate a different category — used by the gate to reject false positives (e.g. antidetect browser , scraping api , screenshot api , residential proxy ). See references/research-patterns.md → "Synthesis Output" for the exact format and Exa as a worked example. Present the profile + the user-company .md to the user for confirmation. Do not proceed until confirmed. Save the confirmed profile to {SKILL_DIR}/profiles/{company-slug}.json . Step 2: Depth Mode + Seed Input Ask clarifying questions via AskUserQuestion with checkboxes: Known competitors? Text area for URLs/names (optional — discovery will find more). Depth mode? quick — marketing surface only, many competitors, ~2-3 tool calls each deep — + external signal (mentions, reviews, news), ~5-8 tool calls each deeper — + public benchmarks + strategic diff vs user's company, ~10-15 tool calls each Target count? Rough number of competitors to research (e.g., 10 / 20 / 50). This is the ONLY user interaction. After this, execute silently until the report is ready. Mode Research per competitor Best for quick Lane 1 only (homepage + pricing) Scanning ~30-50 competitors fast deep Lanes 1+2 ~15-25 competitors with external signal deeper All 4 lanes (+ benchmarks + strategic diff) ~5-15 competitors with full intel Step 3: Discovery (3 parallel waves) Formula : ceil(target_count / 20) queries per wave. Over-discover ~3x because the gate drops ~40-60%. Evaluation on a search-API run shows all three waves are additive — skip any and you lose real competitors: Wave A — Generic alternatives (broad; heavy aggregator noise, filtered out later) "alternatives to {user_company}" "{user_company} competitors" Wave B — Precise category (uses precise_category from the profile) "{precise_category}" verbatim 2-3 queries composed from the most distinctive tokens (e.g. "web search api for ai agents" , "retrieval API for LLMs" ) Wave C — Comparison-page graph (highest precision) "{user_company} vs" "{seed1} vs" , "{seed2} vs" , "{seed3} vs" (seeds from the profile's competitors list) After the searches, run scripts/extract_vs_names.mjs to parse "X vs Y" patterns from result titles — this uniquely surfaces competitors that don't appear as URL hits. Process : Issue 3 parallel browse cloud search Bash calls (one per wave) in a SINGLE message — NOT subagents. Each Bash call chains its 2-4 queries with && . See references/workflow.md → "Discovery — parallel Bash, not subagents" for the exact recipe. Subagents are too heavy for a workload of 6-12 browse cloud search calls. After all waves complete: node {SKILL_DIR}/scripts/list_urls.mjs /tmp --prefix competitor > /tmp/competitor_urls.txt node {SKILL_DIR}/scripts/extract_vs_names.mjs /tmp --prefix competitor \ --seed "{user_company},{seed1},{seed2},{seed3}" \ > /tmp/competitor_vs_names.jsonl Filter /tmp/competitor_urls.txt — remove blog posts, news, AI-tool directories (seektool.ai, respan.ai, agentsindex.ai, toolradar.com, aitoolsatlas.ai, vibecodedthis.com, etc.), review aggregators (g2.com, capterra.com), databases (crunchbase.com, tracxn.com), user's own domain. See references/workflow.md for the full noise-domain list. For vs_names entries that have a resolved domain , add them. For unresolved names, optionally run browse cloud search "{name}" --num-results 3 and pick the top root domain. Merge with user-provided seed URLs. Dedup by hostname → /tmp/competitor_candidates.txt . Step 4: Gate (category-fit filter) Drop candidates whose marketing identifies them as a different category before enrichment burns tool calls on them. cat /tmp/competitor_candidates.txt \ | node {SKILL_DIR}/scripts/gate_candidates.mjs \ --include "{profile.category_include_keywords joined with commas}" \ --exclude "{profile.exclusion_list joined with commas}" \ --concurrency 6 \ > /tmp/competitor_gated.jsonl grep '"status":"PASS"' /tmp/competitor_gated.jsonl \ | node -e 'require("fs").readFileSync(0,"utf-8").split("\n").filter(Boolean).forEach(l => { try { console.log(JSON.parse(l).url); } catch {} })' \ > /tmp/competitor_passed.txt The gate fetches each candidate's homepage via browse cloud fetch --allow-redirects --format raw , extracts the first 800 chars of visible text, and classifies position-aware: exclude in <title> → REJECT; include in <title> → PASS; hybrid title → hero200 tiebreak; otherwise fall through. Evaluated on a search-API run with 12 mixed candidates: 7/7 real competitors passed, 4/4 wrong-category rejected, 1 known-hybrid edge case rejected. Step 4.5: Confirm enrichment set with the user This step is mandatory. Do NOT skip to enrichment just because the gate ran. Enrichment is expensive: 5 competitors × 5 lane-subagents = 25 subagents, ~10-15 minutes of wall clock, ~300 browse cloud calls. Running it on the wrong set wastes all of that. The gate also has known blind spots: JS-heavy homepages (e.g. Tavily, Firecrawl) — browse cloud fetch returns near-empty text, so keyword matching has nothing to match on → REJECT or UNKNOWN Cloudflare challenge pages (e.g. Perplexity) — title becomes "Just a moment..." → no category signal Semantic variants — "search foundation" / "retrieval backbone" don't lexically match a list centered on "search API" Domain ambiguity — brave.com (the browser) vs api-dashboard.search.brave.com (the actual API product) can confuse classification The user almost always has domain knowledge the skill lacks. Ask them. Process — the main agent: Read /tmp/competitor_gated.jsonl and group rows: PASS bucket : everything with status=PASS. UNKNOWN bucket : status=UNKNOWN (fetch failed — always surface, these are the silent misses). Rejected-brand bucket : top ~10 REJECT rows whose title mentions a well-known brand pattern (e.g. contains the token from a user-supplied seed list, or appears frequently in the Wave C "X vs Y" graph). Present the buckets to the user, one table per bucket, with URL + title + reason (for rejects). Use AskUserQuestion with a checkbox list of all candidates across the three buckets, plus a free-text "add more" field. The prompt should be explicit: "Here are the gate's picks plus a few it was unsure about. Tick the ones that are real competitors in your space, and paste any URLs I missed (comma-separated). Enrichment will run on ONLY the ticked set." Write the confirmed set to /tmp/competitor_enrichment_set.txt (one URL per line). This is the input for Step 5 — not /tmp/competitor_passed.txt . If the user doesn't respond or explicitly says "just run it", fall back to /tmp/competitor_passed.txt as-is, but warn in chat that the run may waste budget on wrong-category hits.