Intelligence Reports · Guide
What a competitor monitoring report should actually contain
Most competitive intelligence and market monitoring produces a list of links and calls it intelligence. A report that gets acted on looks different, and it is usually much shorter than the people commissioning it expect.
Written from running a weekly opportunities report for organizations from lean teams to a Fortune Global 500 enterprise. The worked example below is invented; the structure is not.
The short version
A competitor monitoring report is doing its job when a busy person can read it in under two minutes, and finish knowing what to do first. That imposes a structure:
- One bottom line at the top — a single sentence naming what to act on first, and why.
- A handful of items, prioritized, each with the development, why it matters to you, and a first move.
- A named source on every item, linked.
- A route — who in the business this item is for.
- Nothing else. No charts, no sentiment score, no volume graph.
Everything below is an expansion of that list, including the part most people get wrong, which is the last one.
A worked example of a weekly intelligence report
This is fictional, but the shape is exactly what goes out. Read it the way its recipient would — scanning, on a phone, before a meeting.
Four items. Under 300 words. Everything a recipient needs to decide, and nothing they would have to skim past.
The bottom line goes first, and it is one sentence
If a report opens with a list, the reader supplies their own priority order — usually whichever item is written most dramatically. Opening with an explicit judgment of what matters most is the single highest-value line in the document, and the hardest to write.
The discipline that makes it work is a word limit. One sentence, thirty words, naming buyers, values and deadlines where they exist. A bottom line that runs to a paragraph is not a bottom line; it is a summary, and summaries do not tell anyone what to do.
Every item answers “why does this matter to us”
A competitor opening a depot is a fact. An engineer is now within a day of your Benelux accounts, and response time was your differentiator there is intelligence. The gap between them is the entire value of the report, and it cannot be produced without knowing the business in detail — what it sells, where, to whom, and what it wins on.
Scope is part of that specification, and it is easy to set too narrowly. Our study of which national presses actually get heard found coverage concentrating hard on a handful of countries; a monitoring brief inherits that bias unless someone states the markets that matter and insists on them.
In practice this means the specification of the company is longer than any individual report. Capabilities, sectors, geographic scope, the sites it operates, the accounts it cares about, what counts as in-scope and what does not. Monitoring set up without that produces topic-matching, which reads like intelligence and is not.
The hard part is what you leave out
Every competitive intelligence system faces the same trade-off: catch more, or be right more often. Most are tuned for the first, because a missed item is invisible and a delivered item looks like output.
That is backwards. A flagged non-opportunity costs more credibility than a missed one. A reader who finds two irrelevant items in a report starts skimming the third, and within a month has stopped opening it. Five high-conviction items beat twenty plausible ones, and the rule that produces them is simply: when in doubt, leave it out.
The consequence is that most of the work of specifying a report is negative. Defining what to look for takes a paragraph. Defining what to reject takes several, and it is where the accuracy actually comes from — the categories that superficially match but are not the business, the adjacent sectors, the item types that look like opportunities and never convert.
The subtlest exclusion is the difference between relevant and actionable. A contract you could theoretically supply into, through whoever wins it, is not something you can bid for. It is interesting. It is not an opportunity, and reporting it as one trains the reader to distrust the label.
Every source is named, and its limits are stated
Every item carries the source it came from, linked. That is partly so the reader can verify it, and partly so they can weigh it: a public procurement notice and a single-source trade report are not the same kind of fact, and pretending otherwise is how a report loses trust the first time something turns out to be wrong.
Where a signal is weaker, it should say so. A find in a local-language paper that has been translated at headline level is a lead worth having — but it is a lead, not a confirmed development, and it should be presented as one.
Counting sources is not a substitute for checking them. In our own newsroom study of where the world’s news copy actually comes from, most outlets covering an international story were not reporting it themselves — so five outlets carrying a story can be one account, counted five times. The same trap applies to monitoring: a development corroborated by four sources may have one origin.
Items are routed, not broadcast
A tender is for sales. A competitor’s expansion is for leadership. A regulatory consultation is for quality or compliance. Sending everything to everyone means each recipient reads a report that is mostly not for them, which is the same problem as low precision arriving by a different route. Different teams should receive different cuts of the same week.
What does not belong in a competitor monitoring report
- Volume metrics. How many mentions there were this week is a fact about the monitoring, not about the market.
- Sentiment scores. Nobody has ever changed a decision because coverage moved from 0.61 to 0.57.
- A dashboard to log into. If the report requires the recipient to go somewhere, it will be read for three weeks and then not.
- Everything that happened. Completeness is the enemy. The value added is subtraction.
Related guides
SourcesWhere market signals actually appearWhich signals show up where — and what monitoring in English only costs you.Read the guide →
CadenceWhat to monitor, and how often each one movesThe eight categories worth tracking, and why only two of them reward watching daily.Read the guide →
This is what we produce, weekly, for organizations of every size.
Competitor moves, tenders, regulatory changes and market signals — tracked across thousands of sources in over a hundred languages, judged against your priorities, and delivered short enough to read.