How to Research Competitors and Your Market with Perplexity

The short version

Perplexity is a fast way to see your market the way a customer does. It reads competitors’ websites, listings, reviews and local news, and gives you a summary with links. Use it to spot price gaps, unmet needs and what customers keep complaining about.

Step by step

1. List your competitors. Ask who offers your service in your area, or paste names you already know.
2. Compare the basics in a table: services, prices, hours, guarantees, how to book.
3. Read the reviews through Perplexity. Ask for the most common praise and complaints for each.
4. Look for gaps: services nobody offers, price ranges nobody covers, complaints you could fix.
5. Run Deep Research for a full market picture. Perplexity lists marketing among the areas it handles well.
6. Set up a Project with competitors’ websites as links and domains to prioritize, plus your notes. See use Perplexity Projects.
7. Schedule a check-in. In Notifications, create a scheduled search that runs weekly.

Prompts to copy

Map the market:

I run a [business] in [town/area]. Who are my main competitors within [distance]?
Table: name, website, services, price range, rating and number of reviews. Link each source.

Mine the reviews:

Summarize what customers praise and complain about most for [competitor 1], [competitor 2]
and [competitor 3], based on public reviews. Quote short examples and link them.

Find a gap:

Based on that, what are customers in [area] asking for that nobody offers well?
Give 3 ideas I could test, with the evidence for each.

Weekly scheduled search:

Summarize any new prices, services, promotions or news from [competitor names] this week, with links.

Example

A dog groomer in a mid-sized town asks for nearby competitors and their prices. Perplexity finds five, with a sourced table. The review summary shows two common complaints: long waits for appointments and no weekend slots. She adds Saturday mornings and mentions short wait times on her website.

Mistakes to avoid

• Trusting old prices. Competitors’ pages change; check the date and the live site.
• Treating review counts as the full story. A small sample can be skewed.
• Copying a competitor. Use the research to find what’s missing, not to clone what’s there.
• Missing the citations. Keep the links so you can recheck later.
• Researching once and forgetting. Markets change. A short weekly scheduled search costs you a minute to read.

When not to use it

Perplexity sees only what’s published. For real numbers on your local market, combine it with what you hear from customers, suppliers and your own sales data. For help turning research into a website, see what we do for you.

Related: use Deep Research and compare products with Perplexity.