There are few things more satisfying than catching a competitor snooping around your website. We had one of those moments recently.
Primer's Website Reveal identified someone from one of our competitors visiting our site. They weren't just on the homepage either. They moved between our /compare page, /customers page, and homepage.
Unless that competitor was suddenly in the market for Primer, it looked a lot like competitive research. And we could see it happening.
That's one of my favorite side effects of Website Reveal. You spend plenty of time wondering what your competitors are doing, and every so often, you get to see them wondering the same thing about you.
But catching competitors on your website is only half the fun. Account Research lets you study how a competitor is going to market, while Website Reveal shows you when they turn around and start studying you.
Put the two together and competitive research becomes a lot less one-sided.
Start by turning the lens around
Most competitive research still starts manually. You open a competitor's homepage, check their product pages and LinkedIn, look through ad libraries, save a few screenshots, and try to piece together what has changed.
The information is usually there. The harder part is pulling it together and working out what actually matters.
That's where Account Research comes in. Enter a company's domain and Primer creates a report covering the business, the buyers it appears to target, its GTM approach, and advertising activity across LinkedIn, Google, and Meta.
You can also inspect the ads behind the summary, so you're not relying on interpretation alone.
Look at who they appear to be selling to
Start with the buyer. Account Research can surface primary and adjacent personas, along with signals around company size, industry, and geographic focus.
Compare that with what you already know. Maybe a competitor you've historically thought of as SMB-focused suddenly looks more enterprise-heavy. Maybe one department is showing up much more prominently than before.
Those shifts don't necessarily mean the company has changed strategy, but they can give you a useful clue about where its attention may be moving.
Look at the messages that keep showing up
Next, look at the messaging themes in the ads.
One creative on its own doesn't tell you much. If the same idea keeps appearing across campaigns or platforms, it becomes more interesting.
Maybe the company keeps leading with speed, cost savings, or control. Maybe AI has suddenly become central to the message. Or perhaps its homepage presents a broad platform while the ads focus heavily on one specific use case.
That difference can tell you what the company believes is most likely to get a buyer's attention. It also gives you something useful to compare against your own positioning.
If everyone in the category is making roughly the same promise, there may be more value in finding something your customers care about that competitors aren't talking about particularly well.
Look at what they're actively pushing
A website tells you the full story a company wants to tell about its product. Advertising gives you a better sense of what it's choosing to put in front of buyers right now.
Account Research pulls those ads together and summarizes the broader patterns. You might notice a competitor putting more emphasis behind a new product, speaking to a different persona, or making a stronger enterprise push.
The summary gives you a starting point, but it's still worth looking at the creative yourself. Your team has context the report won't have, like which competitors show up in deals, which objections come up, and which messages already resonate with your customers.
You can see how Account Research works here.
Use the research to decide what's worth testing
Competitive research becomes useful when it changes something you actually do.
Say a competitor's website positions the product broadly, but its ads keep coming back to one specific problem. That might suggest the company is testing or prioritizing something differently in paid campaigns.
Now compare that with what you hear from your own customers. Is everyone in the category talking about the same problem in the same way? Is there something your product can explain or prove more clearly?
That gives you a better starting point for a campaign than simply knowing which ads your competitor is running.
There's also a limit to what you can infer. Public advertising shows you what a company is putting into market, not whether the campaign is working, how much they're spending, or what kind of return they're getting.
Use it as context for your own decisions, not as proof that your competitor has already found the answer.
Then use Website Reveal to see when competitors look back
While you're researching competitors, some of them may be researching you too.
Website Reveal shows which companies are visiting your site, the pages they're looking at, and whether they come back. Where sufficient signals and privacy rules allow, Primer can also surface contact-level information.
For demand gen, that can help surface interested accounts that never fill out a form. For competitive research, it gives you another signal: which competitors are spending time on your site and where their attention seems to be going.
A single visit usually doesn't mean much. Someone landing on a blog post could have arrived there for any number of reasons.
It gets more interesting when the same company keeps returning to your comparison pages, customer stories, pricing, or a particular product area. You still don't know exactly why they're there, but you have more context than you would from a one-off pageview.
Say you've just launched a new comparison page and, over the next couple of weeks, notice repeat visits from one competitor across that page, a related product page, and a customer story.
You probably wouldn't change your strategy based on that alone. But it might be a reason to look more closely at how the page is performing, whether the same message is resonating with prospects, and whether it could use more proof or supporting content.
The visit itself is interesting. The pattern is what makes it useful.
Use the two sides together
Account Research and Website Reveal answer different questions.
Account Research helps you understand how a competitor is going to market: who they appear to be targeting, the messages they're repeating, and what they're actively promoting. Website Reveal shows you when that same company starts spending time with your own positioning and product.
Sometimes those signals line up. You might notice a competitor pushing a new message in its ads, then see people from that company looking at the equivalent part of your product.
Or you might notice repeat visits to a comparison page and use Account Research to see what that competitor is currently saying in the same area.
Neither gives you access to private competitor data. Account Research works from public information, while Website Reveal measures activity happening on your own site.
Together, they give you more context than occasionally checking a competitor's homepage and updating a battlecard.
Start with the competitor you hear about most
You don't need to turn this into a huge competitive research project.
Pick the competitor that keeps coming up in sales calls and run their domain through Account Research. Look for one thing worth paying attention to: a buyer they seem to be prioritizing, a message that keeps appearing, or a shift in what they're promoting.
Then check Website Reveal and see whether they've been spending any time on your side too.
The goal isn't to follow every move a competitor makes. It's to notice the ones that could actually affect your own marketing.
