Competitive Intelligence Report: What to Include + Template
, 8 min, By Ahmet Nuri Ozcelik
A competitive intelligence report names what moved, why it matters and what to do, with dated evidence. See the sections and a paste-ready template.
Quick answer: A competitive intelligence report is a short, dated document that tells a defined reader what changed among competitors, why it matters, what to do about it, and the evidence behind each point. The useful ones are brief and written for one audience, and every line traces to a specific dated change rather than someone's recollection. Put what moved, why it matters, what to do and the sources in that order, and the report stays short enough to send every week.
The hardest part of a competitive intelligence report isn't formatting. It's establishing what changed. When nobody can say what moved last week, no template helps. Fix the sourcing first and the report gets short on its own.
What is a competitive intelligence report, and who reads it?
A competitive intelligence report is a recurring read that tells people what competitors did and what to do about it. It isn't a battlecard, the standing reference for one competitor that sellers open mid-deal. It isn't a landscape study, a point-in-time analysis of a whole market. The report says "this changed, so update that."
SCIP, the professional body for the field, ties the practice to legal and ethical conduct, and its code of ethics sets out the rules. Encyclopedia.com quotes SCIP as defining competitive intelligence as "the legal and ethical collection and analysis of information" about competitors. If you searched "what is competitive intelligence," that's the short version. Public pages, public pricing, public product notes. Nothing sneaky.
The usual readers are sellers, product and leadership. My view: one report for all three serves nobody. Sellers want the talk-track change. Leadership wants the positioning shift. Pick a primary reader per report and write for that person.
You may not carry the title of competitive intelligence analyst. You probably have the job anyway, next to launches, messaging and enablement. That's who this is for.
The four sections a useful report carries
Four sections cover it. Keep them in this order.
1. What moved. Two to five changes that matter this period, each stated as a fact. A pricing change. A plan change. A product launch. A feature added or removed. A messaging change. Cosmetic edits stay out, because they pad the list.
2. Why it matters. One or two sentences tying the change to your positioning, a segment or a deal motion. This takes your judgment. Nobody else can say what a competitor's new plan means for your story.
3. What to do. A named action with an owner and a date. A battlecard line to update. A talk track to adjust. A question to raise with product. Choosing the action is judgment too: you decide what the change deserves. An owner and a next step give the reader something to do with it. Without an action, the report is a news digest.
4. Evidence and date. The source page, the capture date and the changed text, so a reader can check any line in seconds. A line without a date is an opinion.
How do you keep it short? Four constraints, offered as a recommendation rather than a statistic:
- A ceiling on items.
- One reader.
- A fixed day of the week.
- A rule that nothing goes in without a dated source.
The last rule does most of the work. It filters out the forwarded screenshot and the "I heard they're moving upmarket" from a hallway chat.
A report is only as good as the changes behind it
Here's my thesis, and it's a reasoned hypothesis rather than a measured finding. The hard part of a report isn't wording it. It's knowing what actually changed. When "what moved" comes from memory, a forwarded link or a skim of a competitor's site, the report is unreliable before you format it. I'd expect readers to sense that and start discounting the whole thing.
The mechanism is simple. Suppose each line must point to a dated change that someone on your team approved. Then the report becomes a view of a record, not a new writing project. The only original work left is "why it matters" and "what to do." That's the judgment you're paid for.
Compare an alert feed with a reviewed record. My expectation is that a feed firing on every page change trains readers to skim, while a short approved list gives the report its items. That's reasoning about readers, not a claim about any particular tool.
What counts as a meaningful change? Pricing, plan, launch, feature, messaging, promotion, customer story. Cosmetic edits get filtered, and a human decides what enters the record. A tool can do the filtering, but your team should decide what's true. If you want that sourcing layer without building it by hand, start with tracking changes on competitor websites.
Limits, plainly:
- A website record covers a competitor's own public pages. It doesn't cover review sites, job postings, ads or interviews.
- A change needs two captures. A new setup has no detected-change history on day one.
- Your quarterly landscape still needs conversations a website can't give you.
Report formats compared: weekly brief, battlecard refresh, monthly summary, quarterly landscape
With the sourcing rule in place, "competitive intelligence report" still covers four different documents. SlideTeam's guide to 20 report examples with templates is one place to browse layouts. I haven't reviewed it in depth, so I won't describe what it covers. A layout isn't a cadence, anyway. The table below is my own framing, not data.
| Format | Primary reader | What it answers | Built from | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly brief | Sellers and your own team | What moved this week? | Approved changes from the week | It turns into a link dump |
| Battlecard refresh | Sellers | Which claims to retire, recheck or correct? | The record plus the current cards | It only runs after a lost deal |
| Monthly summary | Product and leadership | What patterns show across several competitors? | The weekly briefs | It restates them without a judgment |
| Quarterly landscape | Leadership and planning | Where are positioning and segments shifting? | The dated history | It gets rebuilt from memory |
Each format feeds the next. The weekly brief is the raw material, and the monthly and quarterly documents add judgment.
One honest trade-off. A quarterly study can include customer interviews and field intelligence, and a record built from competitors' websites doesn't cover either. That larger program belongs to enterprise CI platforms and dedicated teams. If you're one person, the weekly brief is the format you can actually keep up.
A paste-ready competitive intelligence report template
Here is the competitive intelligence report template I'd start from. It works as a document or an email, and it's the sourcing rule made visible.
COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Period and reader
Week of [date]. For: [one named reader or group].
What moved
1. [Competitor] — [page] — [change type]: [one-sentence fact]
2. ...
Why it matters to us
[One or two sentences per item. Tie it to positioning, a segment or a deal motion.]
What we should do
[Action] — Owner: [name] — By: [date]
Evidence
[Source page] — captured [date] — changed text: "[paste the line]"
Open questions
[Anything you heard but can't source yet.]A competitive intelligence report example makes the shape clearer. This one is illustrative, with invented placeholder content:
What moved
1. Competitor A — pricing page — plan change: the mid-tier plan
was renamed and now lists a seat minimum.
Why it matters to us
Our unlimited-seats position gets sharper against this tier.
Worth testing in outbound copy.
What we should do
Update the pricing line on the Competitor A card — Owner: PMM — By: Friday
Evidence
Competitor A pricing page — captured [date] — changed text: "[plan line]"
Open questions
A seller says Competitor A is discounting. No source yet.One rule makes the template work. Every "What moved" line carries a source and a date. Anything without both goes under "Open questions." That's the line between a report and a rumor mill.
How to build the weekly report from approved changes in Discera
Discera is competitive intelligence software for product marketers. Discera Intel monitors competitors, explains each meaningful change, keeps a dated, searchable history, and helps keep battlecards current. It watches up to 25 key pages per competitor on the competitor's own website, captures every tracked page daily, and checks for meaningful changes each night. It needs no Gong and no call recorder.
Step 1: add the competitors you meet in deals. Start with three. Pages tracked are pricing, product, changelog, newsroom and customer stories on their own sites. That's competitor monitoring without a daily checklist. Individual blog posts aren't tracked. The sitemap watch lists each competitor's newly published pages in one "New pages" item, and an admin chooses which to track.
Step 2: work the review queue. A member approves, rejects or snoozes each labelled change, with the changed text as evidence. Only approved changes enter the competitor's record. Review hints show how your team decided similar changes before. A hint suggests, and it decides nothing.
Step 3: read the output. The weekly market brief is written on Mondays from approved changes only. It runs to six sentences at most, and each cites the changes behind it. If fewer than two items moved that week, there's no brief. It's on every Intel plan with at least one tracked competitor. Email digests list approved changes daily or weekly. Intel Growth and Scale add Slack delivery and instant alerts, which follow the nightly check.
Step 4: write the report. Paste the brief's items into "What moved" and "Evidence." You write "why it matters" and "what to do." Discera doesn't write them for you. Battlecard upkeep adds suggested updates your team approves: what to retire, recheck or correct. Those feed your action list for battlecards that stay current.
The assistant answers questions like "what changed at Competitor A since last quarter," pointing to the source page and capture date. Intel Starter has 50 messages a month, Growth 300 and Scale 1,000. The Claude and ChatGPT connector reads the same record on every Intel plan.
The brief and the digests need history. Initial page captures can carry dates from the first day, but a change needs two captures, so there are no detected changes to report on day one.
One optional extra. Discera Calls works with Gong, read-only, and can add buyer evidence from sales and customer conversations. With Calls Growth or Scale plus any Intel plan, win/loss stories show up on battlecards at the competitor level. Intel and Calls are separate plans, and either can be bought on its own. Start with win/loss analysis from Gong calls or customer research from sales and customer conversations.
FAQ
What is a competitive intelligence report?
A competitive intelligence report is a short, dated document that tells a defined reader what changed among competitors, why it matters and what to do about it. Every line points to a dated source, so the reader can check it.
How often should you send a competitive intelligence report?
Send the brief on a fixed day every week, because a predictable day is what gets it read. Write the monthly summary and the quarterly landscape less often, since they synthesize patterns rather than list changes. This is a reasoned recommendation, not a benchmark.
What should a competitive intelligence report include?
Four things, in this order: what moved, why it matters, what to do, and the evidence with its date. Add an open-questions list for anything you can't source yet. Cosmetic changes stay out.
How long should a competitive intelligence report be?
Short enough that the reader finishes it. Cap the items at five, write for one reader, and keep anything without a dated source out of the main list. If you keep hitting the ceiling, split the report by reader instead of raising it.
What is the difference between a competitive intelligence report and a battlecard?
The report says what changed this period. The battlecard is the standing reference for one competitor, and the report tells you which of its claims to update.
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