TL;DR: Paste your competitor’s reviews into this prompt and get a full positioning brief showing exactly where to attack.
Competitor research usually means scrolling through product pages and copying what’s working. That’s the wrong move.
The real intel is sitting in the one-star reviews. Because that’s where their customers explain, in plain language, what your competitor can’t fix. Not what they won’t fix. What they structurally can’t fix because of how their product is built, priced, or supported. Every complaint is a positioning opportunity waiting to be written into your headline. And the beauty of it is that your competitor already knows about these problems. They just can’t solve them without rebuilding from scratch.
This prompt from r/PromptEngineering turns that messy pile of reviews into a structured brief in five sections.
What the prompt pulls out
You paste in competitor data (reviews, listing copy, social content) and the model extracts five things:
- 🔍 Promise Audit, every explicit and implicit claim your competitor makes. This matters because the gap between what they promise and what customers report is where your copy lives. If they promise “easy setup” and half the reviews mention a two-hour onboarding call, that’s not a flaw. That’s your headline.
- 💥 Failure Pattern, the top 3 recurring complaints, not the harshest ones but the most common, with estimated frequency and customer emotional state. One angry person is noise. Twenty people saying the same thing in different words is a structural weakness you can build a campaign around.
- Unaddressed Desire, what customers wish the product did (the phrases to scan for: “I wish,” “if only,” “next time I’ll,” “would be perfect if”). These phrases are gold because they’re not complaints about what exists. They’re feature requests for what doesn’t exist yet, and if you can deliver it, you win those customers before they even know you exist.
- Positioning Gap, a single surgical sentence for a competing product that would win those exact customers. Not a vague differentiator. A specific, pointed claim built on real evidence from real dissatisfied buyers.
- Headlines That Win, 3 product headlines that reference what the competitor consistently fails to deliver, without naming them. The best competitive copy never says the competitor’s name. It just describes the problem so precisely that their customers recognize it immediately.
The positioning gap and headline outputs are the ones worth paying attention to. You’re not just cataloging weaknesses. You’re getting a brief for what your messaging should say instead.
Use Cases
This works anywhere you have public competitor data:
- E-commerce sellers writing product listings that differentiate on what the category leader keeps getting wrong. If the top-selling kitchen gadget on Amazon has 400 reviews mentioning it’s hard to clean, your listing leads with “cleans in 30 seconds.”
- SaaS founders rewriting landing page copy to speak directly to switchers who are already frustrated and actively looking for an alternative. You’re not convincing them to leave. You’re just making it obvious where to go.
- Freelancers positioning their services against crowded marketplaces where the common complaint is slow turnaround or zero communication. Your pitch writes itself from their reviews.
- Newsletter operators finding the gap in what adjacent publications miss. Tone, depth, format, frequency. Readers say exactly what they want more of in the comments sections of the competition.
Prompt of the Day
Paste this into Claude or any capable model, then add your competitor data at the bottom:
You are a competitive intelligence analyst. I’m going to give you raw competitor data – product listings, reviews, social content, or descriptions. Your job is to extract a positioning brief.
From the data I provide, extract:
1. PROMISE AUDIT: What does this competitor claim their product delivers? List every explicit and implicit promise.
2. FAILURE PATTERN: From the negative reviews and complaints, identify the top 3 recurring failures. Not the worst reviews – the most COMMON ones. For each: quote the pattern, estimate its frequency, and describe the emotional state of the customer when they write this.
3. UNADDRESSED DESIRE: What do customers WISH this product did that it doesn’t? Look for phrases like ‘I wish’, ‘if only’, ‘next time I’ll’, ‘would be perfect if’. These are your product development brief.
4. POSITIONING GAP: Given the failure pattern and unaddressed desires, write a one-sentence positioning statement for a competing product that would win these customers. Do not be generic. Be surgical.
5. HEADLINE THAT WINS: Write 3 product headlines that directly reference what this competitor consistently fails to deliver. Don’t name the competitor – imply the problem and offer the solution.
DATA: [paste competitor reviews, listing copy, or social content here]
Feed it Amazon reviews, G2 pages, Trustpilot, Reddit threads, YouTube comment sections. Anywhere people talk honestly about a product without trying to be polite about it. The more volume you give it, the sharper the output. A hundred reviews will outperform ten every time because patterns only become visible at scale.
One practical note: run this on your own product reviews too. You’ll see what your customers wish you did differently before they leave to find someone who does it.
If this is useful, send it to someone writing copy or building a product right now. This is the kind of research that takes a full afternoon manually and five minutes with the right prompt.
The Market Intelligence Extraction Prompt- turns any competitor’s public
content into your positioning brief
by u/MixSame7501 in PromptEngineering