A competitor assessment, filled in: three rivals in one market, the source against every line, and the five decisions it produced

The hard part of a competitor assessment is not the columns, it is knowing what belongs in a cell and how short the answer should be. So this page is a finished one rather than a blank one. The market is regional commercial cleaning, chosen because it is competitive, unglamorous and resembles most readers' markets more than a software example would. The company doing the assessment and the three competitors are invented, so the names tell you nothing and the shape tells you everything: the kind of evidence to collect, how to write a cell, and what the assessment has to produce before anybody closes the file.

Assessment date 20 October 2026. Owner, the marketing lead. The decision it supports: where to spend the next quarter's effort to win more five to fifteen site contracts.

Set-up: who is on the list, and why

Competitor	Category	Why it is on the list	Where it was found
Northgate Facilities	Direct, larger	Appears in the top three for seven of our twelve commercial queries and wins the contracts we lose on process rather than price	Search results for our own query list, plus two lost tenders
Brightwell Clean	Direct, similar size	Same size, same radius, and the only rival our customers name unprompted	Sales call notes from the last two quarters
Hales Janitorial Group	Indirect, national	Takes the multi-site end of the market through procurement portals we do not bid in	Two tender notices and their careers page

Three is the right number here and five is the ceiling. A list of twelve is a list nobody refreshes, and the names should come from evidence rather than from memory. Working out which companies genuinely compete for your searches is a separate exercise with a surprising outcome, and it is set out in competitor analysis as a repeatable method.

Positioning, in their words rather than ours

	Northgate Facilities	Brightwell Clean	Hales Janitorial Group
Who they say it is for	Offices and business parks, 10 to 200 sites	Independent shops, clinics and small offices	National retail and logistics estates
The promise, quoted	One contract, every site, one invoice	The same cleaner every week, who knows your building	Audited compliance across every location
What they position against	Juggling several local suppliers	Faceless national contractors	Inconsistent regional providers
Proof they show	Named client logos and a case study with a cost per square foot figure	Reviews and a photograph of the actual team	Accreditations, an audit process and ISO numbers on every page
The gap in their story	Nothing about the people doing the work	Nothing about what happens when the regular cleaner is away	Nothing a buyer under ten sites can act on

The discipline in this tab is quotation. A cell that says modern and professional is your paraphrase and it is worthless. A cell that says one contract, every site, one invoice is their claim, which is a thing you can beat, match or leave alone.

Evidence, with a source and a date on every line

Line	Northgate	Brightwell	Hales	Source
Published pricing	None, quote only	Hourly rate from a figure on the services page	None, tender only	Their own websites, read 18 October 2026
Review count and rating	Many reviews, strong average	Fewer reviews, higher average	Almost none in our region	Google Business Profiles, same date
Pages aimed at our queries	A page per service and a page per town	One services page, no town pages	Sector pages only	Site crawl and the search results for our query list
Hiring signals	Two area supervisor roles open	Nothing open	A regional contract manager for our county	Job adverts on their sites and on a job board
Where they advertise	Paid search on service terms, local sponsorship	Local social, van livery	Trade press and procurement portals	Search results, their social pages, two trade titles
Traffic shape	Larger, mostly branded	Smaller, mostly non-branded local	National, mostly branded	A traffic estimate tool, read as a shape rather than a number

Two rules make this tab defensible. Every cell carries a source and a date, so a conclusion can be rechecked rather than argued about. And a traffic estimate is read as a pattern rather than a figure, for the reasons set out in how to read a competitor traffic estimate properly.

The pricing row deserves a note, because it is the one that changes strategy. Two of the three publish nothing, which tells you the market quotes rather than lists, and the one that publishes a rate is using price as the filter at the small end. What a rival's published price is doing to the buyer's expectation, and the fences between offers that make a price hold, is the subject of strategic pricing.

Scoring, one to three

Factor	Us	Northgate	Brightwell	Hales
Clarity of the offer	2	3	3	2
Proof on the site	1	3	2	3
Search presence on our queries	2	3	1	1
Reviews	2	3	3	1
Fit for the 5 to 15 site buyer	3	2	1	1

One to three rather than one to ten, because a ten point scale invites an argument about whether something is a six or a seven and produces the same decision either way. Score ourselves in the same table or the scores mean nothing.

The two rows to read together are the last two. Nobody is strong with the buyer we fit best, and we are weakest on proof. That is the finding, and it arrived from two rows rather than from twenty.

The five decisions it produced

Finding	Decision	Owner	By
Northgate has a page per service and per town; we have one services page	Match: build six service pages and four town pages	Marketing lead	15 December
Our site shows no proof while all three rivals do	Beat: three named case studies with a figure in each, plus photographs of our own team	Operations manager	30 November
Brightwell promises the same cleaner every week and says nothing about cover	Beat: publish the cover guarantee we already operate, in writing, on the service page	Marketing lead	15 November
Hales wins multi-site work through procurement portals	Skip this quarter: bidding needs accreditations we do not hold yet, and the 5 to 15 site buyer is the better use of the quarter	Managing director	Reviewed in April
Northgate is recruiting two area supervisors in our patch	Watch: set a monthly check on their job adverts and their new town pages	Marketing lead	Monthly

A row without a decision is a row that does not leave the sheet. Skip is a legitimate decision and it is the one that keeps the list honest, because a quarter has room for four pieces of work and an assessment that produces eleven has produced none.

The one page that comes out of it

Sales does not read the sheet. What sales carries is six lines, written from the positioning tab: who each rival is best for, their promise in their own words, the gap in it, and the sentence to use when a buyer names them. For this assessment, the Brightwell sentence is the useful one, because a buyer who wants the same cleaner every week is asking about cover rather than about staffing, and we can answer that in writing.

What makes an assessment like this wrong

• No date on a cell. Pricing and positioning move. An undated claim becomes a wrong claim without anybody noticing.
• Paraphrase in the positioning tab. Your summary of their promise is your opinion. Quote them.
• The list growing to twelve. Three to five, chosen from evidence, refreshed quarterly. The rest go in a watch list with no columns.
• Scoring yourself generously. Score your own site from the buyer's side of the screen, or have somebody outside marketing do that column.
• Ending in the sheet. The output is the decisions table and the one pager. Everything above them is working.
• Treating it as a one-off. Set the refresh date in the calendar now. What to watch between refreshes, and which tools watch it, is in monitoring competitors in search.

If you want the empty version of this to fill in with your own market, the four tabs and the twenty columns are set out in the competitor analysis template.

Questions about writing one of these

How long should a competitor assessment take?

A day for three competitors, done properly, and most of that day is reading their pages and their job adverts rather than filling cells. A week spent on it means the list is too long.

Where does the evidence come from?

Their website, their business profile and reviews, their job adverts, their social pages, the search results for your own commercial queries, trade press, and your own sales notes on deals you lost. Job adverts are the most underrated source, because hiring is a plan with a salary attached.

Is it legal to collect this?

Everything above is published material read in public. Keep it that way: no misrepresenting who you are to get a quote, no using a customer's confidential information, and no scraping behind a login.

How many competitors should it cover?

Three to five with full columns. Anybody else belongs in a one line watch list, promoted only when they start showing up in your results or your sales calls.

Should we name competitors in public content?

You can, and the test is whether you would be comfortable for them to read it. Dated, accurate and neutral comparisons are useful to buyers; a page that misstates a rival's pricing is a complaint waiting to arrive.

How often should it be refreshed?

Quarterly for the positioning and evidence tabs, monthly for the watch items, and immediately when you lose a deal to somebody on the list, because that is the cheapest evidence you will ever get.

The assessment somebody else is running on you

Every row above is a judgement one business formed about three others by reading what they published. The same thing now happens automatically and at speed: a buyer asks an assistant who to use for commercial cleaning in a given place, and gets back two or three named companies with a sentence about each, built from those companies' pages, reviews and roundups. It is a competitor assessment nobody in your market commissioned, and it reaches the buyer before your one pager does. Worth reading the version of it that exists in your category, with your own name left out of the question so the answer comes back clean. AI Knows Us asks those buying questions across the main assistants and records who gets named and what the answers were built from.