Workflow 3: Competitive Analysis with Chained Agents
Competitive analysis is one of my favorite use cases of AI because AI is great at finding patterns on large datasets. The key is to give each agent a job.
Give each agent a job
Each agent completes a task before passing the structured output to the next stage:
Agent 1, GBP categories: Review the categories of the company I work with, find additional categories, and review competitor categories.
Agent 2, Location and Service Area Pages: Review competitors’ location or service area pages, compare them to ours, and identify differences.
Agent 3, Gaps in content: If a tool shows gaps in content, this agent helps me plan next steps based on search volume.
Consolidate into a final agent: The final agent combines these outputs to identify patterns and anything that previous agents missed.
Collect data
Before the AI analyzes anything, I collect structured data. For Google Business Profile analysis, this includes:
For location page analysis, I collect:
- Page type
- Internal links
- Content structure compared to competitors
- Historical organic performance
Perform competitive analysis in four steps
The entire competitive analysis takes place in four steps: define the dataset, mine the data, run models, and identify gaps.
Here is an example request specific to GBP categories:
“You are analyzing local SEO signals for (business type) in (city). Use ONLY the data provided below. Do not draw on outside knowledge. Identify: 1) the most common primary category, 2) secondary categories in more than 3 competitors, 3) any category patterns in the top 3 that differ from the others. Return a structured table. Tag any business with a significantly different pattern.”
The workflow quickly surfaces patterns such as:
- Geographic locations that your competitors focus on that you are missing out on
- Review the speed at which you are not keeping up
- Content gaps
- Category consensus issues, where your competitors use categories that you don’t use
These insights become the basis for the strategy, but I still make the final decisions.
