How to Do Competitor Research in Claude and ChatGPT

To research a competitor in Claude or ChatGPT, paste their homepage URL into a connected research skill instead of asking the model what it “remembers.” Training data is late and incomplete. A live pass can read positioning, pricing pages, ads, reviews, and hiring signals from the site as it is today. ToolRouter’s Competitor Research skill is that pass.

This is a startup job, not another SEO-audit clone. For page-level SEO see How to do SEO in Claude. For finding people, see How to find leads in Claude.

What the assistant can do without a tool#

The Model Context Protocol is how the client calls the skill. You still owe the reader a link to the page the number came from. If the report and the live site disagree, the live site wins.

Do not treat the result as legal evidence or as a complete market study. It is a structured first pass so a founder does not spend a day copying tabs.

How to connect (once per assistant)#

• Claude (personal): Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector. URL https://api.toolrouter.com/mcp/anthropic. Connect Claude.
• Claude Team: only an Owner adds it. How to add MCP on Claude Team.
• ChatGPT: Developer mode app, URL https://api.toolrouter.com/mcp. OpenAI Developer mode. Connect ChatGPT.
• Cursor: How to add MCP to Cursor.
• Grok Bot: How to add MCP to Grok Bot.

Share the catalog across the company with For teams so the intern and the founder are not on two different research stacks.

The prompt to type#

Full pass:

Run a competitor report on https://example.com
I need positioning, pricing, what they advertise, and who they are hiring.
Cite pages. If a fact is missing, say so.

Narrow:

Research https://example.com
Only identity, positioning, and pricing. Skip social.

Then a useful follow-up that is *not* the same tool:

Audit their pricing URL for SEO and list the gaps we could own.

That second turn should hit SEO Analysis, not a second guess. If you need accounts to contact after the map is clear, Lead Finder is the people tool. Keep the jobs separate so the model does not blend a job-ad scrape with a made-up VP name.

The competitor skill runs as a job. It can take a while. Wait for the report. Advertising and app-store sections are often the slow ones.

How to read the report like a grown-up#

1. Open the homepage yourself. If the hero claim in the report is not on the site, throw that line out.
2. Pricing. If the tool did not see a public price, write “not public.” Do not let the assistant invent a SKU.
3. Hiring. Job posts are intent, not a roadmap you can quote to a customer.
4. Ads. Creative in an ad library is what they are testing, not what works.
5. Share it in the team brain if you are on a ToolRouter team so the next person does not rerun the same URL blindly. Team brain.

For a company-wide rule on who may run research tools, use How to manage MCP for a team.

When ToolRouter is not the answer#

• You already pay for a full Bright Data / Similarweb / dedicated intel seat and need those graphs. This is a URL-in report, not those indexes.
• You needed a legal diligence file. Hire counsel.
• You only wanted a SWOT from a pitch deck you already have. Paste the deck. No catalog required.

Connect ToolRouter, paste the rival’s homepage, and ask for pricing and positioning with citations.