3 AI Tools To Streamline Your Competitor Research
May 12, 2025
You’re Not Falling Behind — You’re Already Behind
Your sales are slipping, your inbox is filled with half-read advice columns, and your latest “big idea” barely made a ripple. You’ve tried discounts, a newsletter, maybe even a rebrand. Nothing sticks. It feels like you’re tossing darts in the dark while your competitors are hosting laser-guided marketing masterclasses.
Then one late night, doomscrolling through your competitor’s social feeds and landing pages, it hits you: they’re outmaneuvering you. Their messaging is sharper, their offers more targeted, and their visibility? Way beyond yours. It’s not just frustrating—it’s humiliating.
But you’re not out of options. You just need a smarter, faster way to decode what your rivals are doing—without spending weeks on manual research or blowing your budget on a consultant.
That’s where AI comes in.
In this post, I’ll walk you through three new AI-powered competitor research tools that promise to do the heavy lifting for you. We’ll focus on those offering free trials and instant access—because when you’re already playing catch-up, there’s no time to waste.
| 🚨If you’re short on time and just want the best tool for AI-powered competitor research, Claude AI Assistant is my go-to recommendation. Keep reading to see how it stacks up against the competition and why it’s worth your attention. |
Owler
Owler is an AI-assisted competitive business intelligence platform that lets you choose which companies to track on your personal feed.
Its pricing ranges from a budget-friendly free Community plan to a Pro version at $39 per month (billed annually at $468 per year).
There’s also an Enterprise tier, but pricing for that is typically negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
The free version is fairly limited and is described as “perfect for occasional research.” You’ll get access to one company profile per month and can use the basic search feature without restrictions.
However, the advanced search tool is restricted—you’ll only see a few initial results, while the rest of the company list remains blurred.
That said, the one profile view you get per month is impressively detailed. It includes the company’s overview with basic information, recent news and media mentions, as well as tabs for competitors, acquisitions, funding, investments, and a dedicated section for news and insights.
While the Overview tab is mostly accessible on the free plan, the other tabs display only a limited amount of information.
From my testing, it appears that Owler only lists companies that are already prominent enough to be tracked in their system.
As far as I can tell, there’s no option to paste in a competitor’s URL or manually add a business for analysis—the platform limits you to the companies already cataloged.
This means whether you can use it to track your direct competitors depends largely on chance.
The good news is that, even on the free plan, you can search for companies before committing.
Claude AI
Claude AI is a chatbot assistant designed with a focus on brainstorming, data analysis, and text/code generation.
While these features aren’t groundbreaking—especially with models like ChatGPT having offered them for years—Claude sets itself apart with a safety- and integrity-first design philosophy.
One standout feature is its use of potentially harmful user requests to help train and strengthen the model’s safeguards, reinforcing its commitment to responsible AI.
The free plan gives you access to Claude’s core features, though with limited usage each month. lysis.
Upgrading to the Pro plan ($20/month) removes those limits and unlocks additional benefits like collaboration tools, access to more Claude models, and a “deep think” mode for more advanced ana
For most users just starting out, the free plan should be more than enough. Getting Claude to help with competitor research is as simple as asking.
For the sake of this experiment, I’ll take on the role of an E Ink review outlet looking to carve out a place in the market. To guide the analysis, I’ll focus on two of the major players in the space: GoodEReader and eWritable:
In addition to a breakdown of both, Claude also follows up with tailored recommendations for further research/action.
Out of curiosity, I asked Claude to export all of this into a report as a Word document. While it couldn’t directly generate or attach a .docx file, it quickly compiled the necessary markup for me to copy into one manually.
Pushing further, I asked it to turn the same information into an infographic—and the results were even more impressive.
Claude opened a side panel and, in real time, began writing the code that generated a clean, if basic, graphic.
It then provided a detailed breakdown of its design choices in the main panel, demonstrating not just execution but thoughtful explanation.
We could go on, but I’d seen enough to be confident in my assessment.
Perplexity
Since Perplexity was the standout in my previous article on fact-finding AI tools, including it in this lineup might feel a bit like cheating. Still, in a space where truly free tools with no strings attached—no demo calls, no upfront commitments—are rare, it earns its place. While competitor research isn’t Perplexity’s core strength, it’s designed to provide well-cited, reasoned summaries from internet sources. And when asked directly, it claims it can assist with competitor analysis, even if it’s not its primary use case.
We’ll be repeating the same hypothetical we fed Claude AI, adding a few details to match what Perplexity’s asking for.
I’m not entirely sure why Perplexity surfaced less information on eWritable than Claude did, but that’s likely a byproduct of its transparent, source-citing approach—unlike some peers, it shows exactly where its information comes from.
That said, it also uncovered some valuable insights Claude missed, such as GoodEReader’s somewhat controversial reputation regarding the objectivity and quality of its review videos. I also appreciated Perplexity’s ability to provide a specific figure comparing GoodEReader’s product markups to those of other outlets.
To top it off, Perplexity even offered a strategy suggestion based on its findings:
Interestingly, Perplexity’s strategy suggestions included more direct criticisms of GoodEReader than Claude’s did—something I didn’t expect. Its recommendations also felt more actionable, offering concrete numbers and a greater variety of ideas to work with.
As with Claude, I asked Perplexity to compile the findings into a Word report.
While it couldn’t generate a .docx file directly, it neatly organized the information into a format that was easy to copy and paste into a document—mirroring Claude’s approach.
Next, I asked Perplexity to convert all this to an infographic as I had with Claude. Unlike Claude, however, it couldn’t do that, though it did try to walk me through how to structure one myself.
I’ll spare you the full recap. It wasn’t exactly the most amazing set of instructions, but I’m not going to hold that too much against Perplexity since this is not at all in its wheelhouse.
The Winner Is…
Based on the results, Claude AI stands out as the top tool in this review.
Claude offers a more intuitive and streamlined approach to competitor research than Owler—particularly useful if you have just a few direct competitors and a clear sense of the business aspects you want to analyze. While Owler excels at delivering a broader range of data across multiple companies—thanks to its blend of AI-powered crawling and human curation—it leaves the heavy lifting of analysis to the user. That makes it better suited for those with prior experience in competitor research.
Perplexity can match—and occasionally outperform—Claude in terms of insight depth, offering more specific data points and a wider variety of strategic suggestions. However, Claude edges ahead with its ability to generate infographics on demand, giving users a visual summary of findings with minimal effort. This is just one of several features that make Claude especially useful for documenting and sharing research internally.
Most importantly, Claude isn’t just a research assistant—it’s capable of helping you implement the strategies it suggests. That makes it a more comprehensive and proactive partner in your competitive analysis journey than the other tools evaluated.
