It can help you find things and it should not be trusted to state facts about specific businesses. The distinction matters. A tool with live search that returns sources you can click and verify is genuinely useful — you’re using it as a search engine with better summarising. A model answering from memory about a named company will produce revenue figures, employee counts and strategic descriptions that sound authoritative and are frequently wrong, sometimes about businesses that barely exist online. The failure is invisible, because there’s no signal distinguishing a real fact from a plausible invention. So the workable division of labour is: AI decides what you should find out and analyses what you bring back, you gather anything factual from a source you could name out loud. For UK limited companies that’s easier than people realise — Companies House gives you filed accounts free.

Three to five, properly, beats a dozen superficially. What you want is the two or three your customers actually mention, plus one who’s doing something structurally different — a newer entrant, someone at a very different price point, or a substitute solving the problem another way. That last one often teaches you more than a direct rival, because direct competitors tend to converge on the same approach and looking only at them makes you blind to the change coming from outside. Beyond about five you’ll stop reading properly and start collecting, which produces a document rather than a decision. One useful addition: analyse one competitor you consider clearly better than you, in detail. Working out precisely what they do differently is more instructive than surveying the field, and it’s usually a small number of concrete practices rather than anything mysterious.

Using publicly available information is entirely normal and legitimate — their website, published prices, public reviews, filed accounts, job adverts and social posts are all published for anyone to read. Where you need to be careful is anything involving misrepresentation or confidentiality. Don’t pose as a customer to extract commercial information you couldn’t otherwise get, particularly not in writing. Don’t approach their employees for confidential material, and be aware that if you’re a former employee yourself you may be bound by confidentiality or non-solicitation terms that survive your departure. Don’t use anything obtained through a breach of confidence by someone else. And if you’re comparing yourself to a named competitor in your own advertising, comparative advertising rules apply — claims must be accurate, verifiable and not misleading. Ringing a competitor as a genuine prospective customer to ask their price sits in a grey area many businesses treat as acceptable; be honest with yourself about which side you’re on.

Then the analysis has done its job, and that’s genuinely more useful than confirming you’re fine. Two responses, and the first is more common than people expect: much of what makes a competitor better is operational rather than structural — they answer the phone, they quote the same day, their website explains prices clearly, they ask for reviews systematically. Those are copyable within weeks and don’t require capital. The second response is to narrow. If they’re better across the board at serving the general market, the answer usually isn’t to fight them on their ground but to become the obvious choice for a specific segment they serve adequately rather than well — a niche, a geography, a customer type with particular needs. What doesn’t work is competing on price against someone with better economics, or trying to match them on everything with fewer resources. Pick the ground deliberately.