We’ll be frank: If you’re not onboard the AI train yet, you’re being left behind as we speak. Campaigns and market changes are fast-paced and AI tools can pick up the slack. AI tracks competitor activity in real time for you, whether it’s ads, websites, social media mentions, or emails.
And it’s not just about monitoring competitors, either. The best AI tools will give you insights for improving your brand and spotting trends as they arise.
On top of that, the data gathered from competitors can be used to benchmark your brand against the competition. Benchmarking lets you see in clear figures where you’re lagging so you can fix it before it becomes a bigger issue.
In summary, relying on the old software you’ve always been using (or worse, intuition or manual methods) is just not enough anymore.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to five of the best AI tools for competitor tracking: Panoramata, ChatGPT, Kompyte, Crayon AI, and Brand24.
Each tool offers unique features designed to help you gain a competitive edge. From monitoring email campaigns to tracking social mentions, these platforms provide the data you need to stay ahead in your industry.
Panoramata
Do you want to track your competitor’s activity across multiple platforms (email, ads, landing pages, etc.) but don’t want to use several tools to do the same thing? Do you want to know at a glance what your competitors have been up to for the past week?
Panoramata automatically summarizes your competitor’s activity and feeds them to your dashboard so you can know their latest updates with a single log-in.
Monitor your competitor’s:
- Ads
- Landing pages
- Email newsletters
- Email flows (email series or automations)
- SMS
- Products and prices
- Software and tech stacks
- Marketing calendars
- SEO
- Website changes
You can also create instant personalized benchmarks that are updated in real time composed of brands you want to benchmark yourself against or an industry of your choosing.
On top of that, with Panoramata, you can:
- Generate insights from a brand’s activity, which tells you what you should do next
- Create action points for your creatives
- Get personalized insights for your brand’s use case
- Get help from our AI assistant with any questions you may have
- Generate subject lines for emails
With AI-generated summaries, you don’t have to manually check your competitor’s emails, ads, social media, and websites to get a feel for their direction and changes to their campaigns. A single sign-in will tell you all you need to know and all the highlights from the past week.
Have a competitor or brand in mind that you want to check on?
Go to the brand page on Panoramata and click on “Summarize updates”. This generates a summary of that brand’s marketing efforts in the last fourteen days, including product launches, promotional highlights, and email volume.
That’s not all you can do with Panoramata, though. Go beyond summaries by grabbing insights from your competitors.
- Go to your competitor’s page
- On their summary tab, click on “get best practices”
- Wait for it to generate inspiration action points
The list will tell you what your competitors are doing well in the last two weeks that you can mimic or integrate. As the term “action point” implies, the insights generated will be actionable ones that you can use right away in your campaign planning.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
The best AI tools will give you insights for improving your brand and spotting trends as they arise.
You can link your brand on Panoramata, let it compare your marketing data with those of your competitors, and tell you what you should be doing and if there are content or audience gaps you should be paying attention to.
For example, you can receive the following insights:
- Improve your email size
- Optimize your newsletters
- Make sure your content calendar is ready
- Ideas for ads
- Campaigns to consider for the coming weeks
Plus, an AI Assistant is dedicated to finding specific answers to your queries. For example, you can ask it to make a creative brief for you based on best practices from your competitors.
Based on all the features above, we recommend Panoramata as the number one AI tool to consider for a brisk yet effective competitive analysis.
ChatGPT
It wouldn’t be a complete AI tool roundup without ChatGPT. Though it’s just a chatbot, ChatGPT’s use cases in competitive analysis are enormous.
You can use it to:
- Identify competitors
- Find opportunities in your market
- Spot trends
- Identify challenges in your industry or niche
- Analyze specific aspects of your competitor’s marketing strategy
- Extract the main customer sentiments from customer reviews
- Conduct audience research
If the data is available on the web, ChatGPT can find and analyze it for you. However, the trick is to find the right prompts and ask follow-up questions.
Speak to it from different personas and reformulate your questions, if possible, to get all iterations of an answer.
Data inaccuracies are a major downside of ChatGPT but it’s a great place to start when monitoring your competitors.
Kompyte
Kompyte is another great AI-powered competitor analysis tool that monitors competitor data in real time.
For example, it tracks:
- Websites
- Reviews
- Content
- Social media
- Ads
- Job posts
Then, it uses artificial intelligence to filter out unnecessary information so you can get the most relevant insights.
You can also identify both emerging and key competitors on Kompyte and create “battle cards” that quickly convey the most important information about each competitor (great for syncing up with other teams).
Battlecards can also note down win-loss ratios, revenue, customer feedback, and churn.
This fully AI-driven competitor tracking tool can also monitor media mentions and price changes.
Kompyte is perfect if you’re short on time and want to seize every business opportunity. Its collaborative features are a plus, especially for cross-team alignment (such as between sales and marketing).
Crayon AI
Crayon AI stands out for its battle cards, which are visual summaries designed to keep your entire team informed and aligned.
These battle cards compile competitor insights into easily digestible formats that can be shared company-wide, ensuring everyone stays on the same page.
Crayon also integrates seamlessly with tools like Slack and Salesforce, so you can incorporate competitor intelligence into your existing workflows without the hassle of switching platforms.
What makes Crayon AI particularly powerful is its ability to track data from over 300 sources, including:
- News sites
- Social media platforms
- Review websites
- Forums
- App stores
- PR sources
- Hiring websites
- Filing databases
In addition to monitoring these channels, Crayon AI helps businesses identify hiring trends and keep track of press mentions related to competitors.
However, it does have limitations—it doesn’t monitor competitor ads or SEO strategies. For those insights, you’ll need to complement Crayon with other specialized tools.
Brand24
If you're more focused on understanding how your competitors are perceived online rather than monitoring their web traffic or search rankings, Brand24 is a tool worth exploring.
As a powerful social listening platform, Brand24 tracks online mentions of your competitors across various channels, including social media, blogs, forums, news sites, and videos.
With Brand24, you can monitor your competitors’ activities, campaigns, and audience interactions. It allows you to identify who is talking about your competitors and even set up alerts to notify you whenever they’re mentioned.
This real-time tracking ensures you never miss an important development.
The platform also enables benchmarking by comparing your brand against competitors on metrics such as share of voice, engagement, reach, and user-generated content.
Brand24’s sentiment analysis automatically categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, helping you gauge public perception. Additionally, it can analyze spikes in mentions or engagement to uncover the impact of a competitor's campaign or news.
Brand24 is particularly effective for identifying competitors in your industry by tracking relevant keywords. This feature allows you to uncover new players in your market and keep tabs on emerging trends.
While Brand24 excels at social listening, it’s not a comprehensive competitor tracking solution.
Its focus on online mentions and audience sentiment is its strength, making it a great choice for businesses seeking detailed social insights. For broader competitor intelligence, however, you may need to pair it with other tools.
FAQs
What are AI tools for competitive analysis?
AI tools for competitive analysis use artificial intelligence to gather and analyze data about your competitors' strategies, performance, and trends. They help you uncover insights quickly, saving time and improving decision-making for your marketing strategy.
How do AI tools improve competitive analysis?
AI tools automate data collection and provide actionable insights, such as identifying competitors’ keywords, ad performance, or customer sentiment. This allows businesses to spot opportunities, refine their strategies, and stay ahead in the market.
Are AI tools worth the investment for competitive analysis?
Yes, AI tools can be highly valuable by streamlining research and delivering insights that would take much longer to gather manually. They are especially useful for brands looking to enhance their efficiency and make data-driven decisions.
