Who are we really up against?

The product

<your product, and one sentence on what it does>

FINDING URLS. Several tools take a URL and cannot search for one — social_linkedin_posts, social_reddit_posts, social_reddit_comments, company_jobs, company_person, web_fetch. When you need a page, find its URL with YOUR OWN web search first, using a site: filter. That costs nothing and is exact. web_search does the same job for a billed call and is the fallback when you have no search of your own. Never construct a URL from a company name: a wrong URL comes back as a dead page, which reads as an absence of evidence rather than as your mistake.

BATCHING. The keyword tools bill once per call however many terms you send — keyword_volume takes 1,000, keyword_intent 1,000, keyword_overview 700, keyword_ideas 200. Pool your terms and send them in one call rather than looping. A batch whose rows exceed one response comes back trimmed and says how many rows it held versus returned: size the next batch from that figure and send the terms you did not get. A term missing from a trimmed response was withheld, NOT measured at zero. Scoring it as zero is the single most common way one of these runs reaches a confident wrong answer.

Work the five components in this order and do not skip ahead. April Dunford's point is that the order is the method: the category you can credibly claim is determined by your value, which is determined by your unique attributes, which only mean anything relative to the alternatives. Teams that start at the category end up naming one they cannot win.

1. COMPETITIVE ALTERNATIVES — what would they do if you did not exist?

Not "who is in our category". What a prospect would actually do on Monday morning with the budget they have. Three kinds, and most teams only look for the first:

• Named products. domain_serp_rivals on your five clearest money terms

  returns the domains that own those queries. `domain_competitors` on your own

  domain returns who overlaps you across your whole keyword set — often a

  different list, and the difference is instructive. `app_competitors` if the

  buying happens in a store.

• Sustained advertisers. ads_advertisers on the same terms. Someone

  paying every day to reach your buyer is an alternative whether or not you

  think of them as a competitor.

• The status quo. The spreadsheet, the agency, the intern, the manual

  process. Find it with `social_youtube_search` on "how to <the job>" and on

  "<the job> in excel" or "<the job> template" — a tutorial with six figures of

  views is a competitor with a marketing budget of zero and a monopoly on

  habit. Confirm the volume with `keyword_volume` on those phrases.

Write the alternatives list from the prospect's view. If the status quo is not on it, you have not finished this step.

2. UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES — what do you have that they do not?

Attributes, not adjectives. Capabilities, data, integrations, a model, a licence, a distribution position. Verify each against what the alternatives actually ship:

• web_fetch their homepage, pricing page and one feature page as

  `format=markdown`. Use `format=html` when the detail sits in a table you

  need cell by cell.

• company_firmographics for size, revenue band and the technologies they

  run on.

• company_funding for how much capital is behind the roadmap — it tells you

  what they can copy and how fast.

• company_jobs on one or two of their listings for what is coming next. A

  cluster of hires on one function is a roadmap announcement nobody meant to

  make.

• domain_keyword_overlap on your domain and the strongest rival's, once you have identified one.

Strike any attribute an alternative also has. What survives is the only raw material positioning can be built from.

3. VALUE — so what?

For each surviving attribute, answer "so what?" until you reach something the buyer would put in a business case. In B2B that almost always terminates in make money, save money, or reduce a risk that costs money. Three value themes is plenty; five is a prospect who remembers none of them.

Then separate what your competitors have TESTED from what they have merely PUBLISHED — the sharpest thing this data does:

• ads_advertisers on the competitor, then ads_creatives. Sort by run

  length using `first_shown` and `last_shown`. **Anything live 90+ days is a

  claim that survived their own performance review.** That is tested copy and

  it outranks anything on their website, which is untested.

• ads_meta_advertisers for the same read on social, where consumer and SMB

  spend goes — it returns run lengths as dates rather than as pixels, so the

  90-day test above is one you can apply directly.

• domain_top_pages on their domain shows which pages actually earn their

  traffic. The promise on those pages is the one the market rewarded.

A claim they run for a year and a claim they wrote once are different kinds of fact. Label them differently in your report.

4. BEST-FIT CUSTOMERS — who cares a lot?

The segment for whom your differentiated value is not merely nice but decisive. Find them in the evidence rather than in a persona document:

• app_reviews split by rating. Five-star reviews name what the delighted

  bought it for; three-star reviews name the one thing that blocks everyone

  else. Both are segment definitions written by customers.

• keyword_intent over your harvested terms, to see which segment's phrasing

  carries transactional intent and which is still browsing.

• The competitor's job listings and firmographics tell you who they sell to

  now; the gap between that and who complains loudest is often your opening.

Name the characteristic that makes a customer a best fit — a trigger, a scale, a constraint, a stack — not a demographic.

5. MARKET CATEGORY — what context makes your value obvious?

The category sets the buyer's expectations before you say anything. Pick the one where your unique attributes read as table stakes for a leader rather than as an odd extra. Then check that the market uses the word:

• keyword_volume on 5–15 candidate category nouns. A category with no

  search volume is a category you will have to fund the education for.

• keyword_intent on the same list — a category term with commercial intent

  is one buyers already shop in.

• domain_serp_rivals on the winning candidate: whoever owns that term today

  is who you are asking the buyer to compare you to.

Naming a category nobody searches for is a strategy. It is an expensive one, and it should be chosen knowingly rather than by accident.

6. THE SILENCES

List what a serious product in this category should address and this competitor never does — in their ads, their pricing page, their top pages, their hiring. A silence sustained across every surface is either a deliberate segment they have given up on or a weakness they cannot fix. Either one is yours to take.

RULES THAT MAKE THE OUTPUT TRUSTWORTHY

• Cite the tool and the argument behind every number you state.
• Distinguish measured (a tool returned it) from inferred (you reasoned to it).
• State the strongest evidence AGAINST your conclusion before your conclusion.
• Absence of a signal is not evidence of absence. Name which instrument was

  blind and why.

• Coverage is public data and varies by query, country, and date. A thin

  result is a thin result, not an empty market.

• If the data does not settle it, say INCONCLUSIVE and name the one call that

  would settle it. An unspent budget and an uncertain answer at the same time

  is a failed run; so is a confident answer the data did not support.

Deliver

The filled positioning statement, one line per component. Then: their converged bets (what they keep paying to say), their experiments (recent, small, inconsistent), their silences, and the single sentence you would put at the top of your own homepage as a result.