Workflow 3: Competitive analysis with chained agents
Competitive analysis is one of my favorite AI use cases because AI is great at finding patterns across large datasets. The key is giving each agent one job.
Give each agent a job
Each agent completes one task before passing structured output to the next stage:
Agent 1, GBP categories: Looks at the categories for the business I’m working with, finds additional categories, and reviews competitor categories.
Agent 2, Location and service area pages: Looks at competitors’ location or service area pages, compares them to ours, and identifies differences.
Agent 3, Content gaps: If a tool shows we have content gaps, this agent helps me plan next steps based on search volume.
Consolidate into a final agent: The final agent combines those outputs to identify patterns and anything the earlier agents missed.
Collect data
Before 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
Run competitive analysis in four steps
The whole competitive analysis runs in four steps: define your dataset, pull the data, run patterns, and identify gaps.
Here’s an example prompt for GBP categories specifically:
“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 3+ competitors, 3) any category patterns in the top 3 that differ from others. Return a structured table. Flag any business with a significantly different pattern.”
The workflow quickly surfaces patterns such as:
- Geo locations your competitors focus on that you’re missing
- Review velocity you’re not keeping pace with
- Content gaps
- Category consensus issues, where your competitors use categories you don’t
These insights become the foundation for strategy, but I still make the final decisions.
