Automate Competitor Research with n8n and Perplexity AI
Most businesses do competitor research once — when they launch — and then never again. Not because it isn’t useful, but because doing it properly takes time nobody has. So you stay vaguely aware of what your competitors are doing, until the day you’re not.
The same n8n and Perplexity stack that powers automated lead enrichment can be pointed at your competitors instead. Set it up once, run it on a schedule, and get a structured intelligence report dropped into a Google Sheet — weekly, daily, or whenever you want it.
The Same Workflow, a Different Target
If you’ve already built the lead enrichment workflow covered in Automate B2B Lead Enrichment with n8n and Perplexity, you have everything you need. The architecture is identical:
- n8n orchestrates the workflow
- Perplexity AI goes online and does the research
- OpenAI (GPT-4) structures the output into a readable report
- Google Sheets stores the result
The only meaningful differences are the trigger (a schedule instead of a form submission) and the system prompt (tuned for competitive intelligence instead of lead qualification). Both of those are straightforward to change.
If you haven’t built it yet, the full step-by-step is in the lead enrichment post — come back here once the workflow is running.
Switching the Trigger to a Schedule
The lead enrichment workflow fires when someone submits a form. For competitor monitoring, you want it to run automatically on a cadence — no human trigger required.
In n8n, replace the Form trigger with a Schedule trigger. Set it to whatever interval makes sense:
- Weekly — enough for most businesses tracking broad competitor positioning
- Daily — useful if you’re in a fast-moving space or tracking a specific campaign
- Monthly — fine for stable industries where competitor strategy moves slowly
The rest of the workflow stays the same. The agent wakes up, runs the research, and writes to the sheet — on its own.
The System Prompt Is Everything
This is what separates a useful competitor report from a generic company summary. The default system prompt gives you a factual overview. For competitive intelligence, you want something more targeted.
Here’s what to include depending on your goals:
If you’re tracking messaging and positioning:
“Analyse this company’s website and recent online presence. What is their core value proposition? What pain points do they lead with? Who do they appear to be targeting? How have they positioned themselves against alternatives?”
If you’re tracking product or service changes:
“Research this company’s current service or product offering. Have there been any recent changes, launches, or announcements? What are customers saying in reviews?”
If you’re tracking pricing:
“Find any publicly available pricing information for this company. Has pricing changed recently? Are there any promotions or new tiers visible?”
If you’re tracking marketing activity:
“What content has this company published recently? Are they running paid ads? What platforms are they active on and what topics are they covering?”
You can combine these or rotate the prompt weekly to get different angles on the same competitors. The output format is also controllable — ask for bullet points, a scored summary, or a structured table if that’s easier to scan.
Setting Up the Competitor List
Instead of a form feeding in company data, you drive this from a static Google Sheet with a row for each competitor — name, website, and any notes about what to focus on.
The workflow reads from that sheet on each run. If you want to monitor five competitors, you have five rows. The agent processes them in sequence, appending a new research row each time with the date — so you build up a history over time and can see how things change.
That history is where the real value accumulates. A single report tells you where a competitor is today. Six months of weekly reports tells you where they’re heading.
Final Thoughts
Competitor research doesn’t need to be a quarterly project that gets deprioritised the moment anything else comes up. With this workflow running in the background, you’ve got a live feed of what your competitors are doing — structured, dated, and waiting in a sheet whenever you want to look.
The setup takes about an hour. The ongoing cost is a few pence in Perplexity API credits per run.
Watch the full walkthrough here → https://youtu.be/9S6Uq2UVvYA