Intel Competitor Discovery

Competitor Discovery

Finds competitor candidates from search-engine results, so the user does not have to know every competitor by name.

Read Firm Context First

1. Read workspace/firm/profile.md — firm services, industry, geography, and the existing competitor list (used for deduplication).
2. Existing monitored competitors live in workspace/intelligence/competitors/{slug}/!_profile.md.

When to Use

Brand scope. In a multi-brand workspace run discovery per brand — the search phrase and location belong to one brand's market — but check candidates against the shared workspace/intelligence/competitors/ before proposing, and add the brand to an existing profile's brands: [...] instead of duplicating the company. See the Brand Scope Gate in AGENTS.md.

• User asks to find / discover competitors or research the market
• Seeding the monitoring list for a new firm
• Expanding monitoring around a specific service or keyword

Workflow

1. Build the search phrase

From firm context: a service + geography phrase, e.g. "drupal migration agency" or "accounting firm Wroclaw". Ask the user to confirm or refine the phrase and target country.

2. Fetch SERP results

Query a SERP API for the top 10 organic results (depth = 10) for the phrase in the target country. Country is the SERP provider's full location name (e.g. United States, Germany, Poland), not a country code.

• Requires DATAFORSEO_LOGIN / DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD.
• Dry-run (no key): ask the user for candidate URLs or use a provided list, and still run the dedup + profile steps below.

3. Process results

1. Extract root domain from each result URL (lowercase, strip leading www.).
2. Group by domain — one candidate per root domain. When several results share a domain, keep the highest-ranked one (lowest position).
3. Deduplicate against already-monitored accounts: in the app this is the set of existing monitored companies in the workspace (matched by root domain). In B2BForce, match against the competitor list in workspace/firm/profile.md and existing workspace/intelligence/competitors/ slugs. Flag matches as already_exists and count duplicates_skipped.
4. Derive a candidate name from the result title (split on |, -, ::, //; fall back to the domain).

Note: the source pipeline does not auto-filter directories, marketplaces, Wikipedia, aggregators (clutch.co, g2.com), or the firm's own domain — every domain-grouped result is returned (duplicates flagged, not removed). Dropping obvious non-competitors happens in the user review step (§4), not automatically.

Return: results[] (name, domain, url, snippet, position, already_exists), total, duplicates_skipped.

4. Present candidates and confirm

List candidates as a table (mark already_exists rows). Do not auto-add — let the user pick which to monitor. This mirrors the source flow: the search step returns candidates, and only an explicit confirm step creates accounts (candidates already flagged already_exists are skipped on create).

5. Hand off to files-only monitoring

For each confirmed candidate, create workspace/intelligence/competitors/{slug}/!_profile.md and workspace/intelligence/competitors/{slug}/pages.md, then use intel-competitor-monitoring to crawl. New competitors created from candidates default to monitoring_enabled: true, monitoring_frequency: weekly, and company_type: competitor. The homepage starts as the first monitored page with Monitor=true and Priority=high.

Do not write to .agents/firm-context.md. If the firm profile needs a competitor list, update workspace/firm/profile.md.

Workspace Output

Discovery report frontmatter:

---
phrase:
country:
total_results:
duplicates_skipped:
candidates_added: []
date: 2026-06-01
---

Rules

1. One candidate per root domain — always dedupe.
2. Never add the firm's own domain.
3. Confirm with the user before adding to monitoring (no silent writes to the monitored list).
4. Respect rate limits; SERP discovery is a paid API call.

Environment Variables

DATAFORSEO_LOGIN=
DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD=

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