If your goal is to outperform rivals, the questions you ask matter as much as the data you collect. Below you will find practical competitive analysis questions you can use today across market sizing, product and pricing, customer perception, and go-to-market. They work for SaaS, ecommerce, local services, media and enterprise, and map neatly to competitive intelligence questions, competitor survey questions, and Porter’s Five Forces questions. Use them to build a competition analysis questionnaire you can run repeatedly – or plug them into your research workflow and analytics stack. If you’re just getting started, see the first step in competitor analysis and what to include in competitor profiling.
Market and industry questions
How big is the opportunity and how fast is it growing
Quantify the total addressable market, serviceable market, and your realistic share in the next 12 to 24 months. Ask which sub-segments grow faster, which geographies are expanding, and what macro trends or regulations could accelerate or slow demand. Tie findings to volumes, not just percentages, so you can model revenue and channel capacity. A structured competitive analysis feature helps you benchmark assumptions and track changes.
Which competitive forces shape profit pools
Translate Porter’s Five Forces into prompts you can answer quickly. How intense is rivalry on price and features, how strong is buyer power, which substitutes are gaining share, what is the threat of new entrants, and how much do suppliers dictate margins. Convert each answer into an explicit risk or advantage; then monitor competitor performance over time. For a repeatable workflow, follow a step-by-step competitive analysis.
Product and pricing questions
How do competitors price, package, and discount
Document base price, tiers, usage metrics, and required add-ons. Ask which discounts are common by segment, how implementation or support is billed, and what the average deal size is by channel. Identify price fences that protect premium packages and any price cliffs that cause churn at renewal.
Where do you have feature parity and true differentiation
List must-have capabilities, nice-to-haves, and emerging bets. For each competitor, ask which features are table stakes, which are differentiators, and which are merely noise. Probe performance ceilings, integrations, and time-to-value. If you claim parity, validate it with proofs like speed, reliability, workflows, or measurable outcomes.
How do rivals prove ROI and de-risk the purchase
Ask what ROI stories competitors use, which metrics they quantify, and over what time window. Do they offer pilots, guarantees, or benchmarks. Understand the proof mix – case studies, calculators, and third-party validation – so you can raise the bar with stronger evidence or shorter paths to value.
Customer perception and demand questions
Who should be in your survey and what screens will you use
Define screening criteria that match your target market. Ask about role, company size, industry, tools in use, and purchase authority so you exclude noise. Confirm whether respondents have evaluated or purchased in the last 12 months to reduce memory bias and make your competitor research questions actionable.
What do people recall and recognize without prompting vs with prompting
Run unprompted brand awareness first by asking which brands come to mind for the category. Then run prompted awareness by showing a list of brands. The gap between unprompted and prompted awareness tells you who is salience leader vs who is merely familiar. Use this to shape your competitive analysis survey questions and positioning.
Which attributes, likes, and deal breakers drive decisions
Ask respondents to rate brands on specific attributes like reliability, price fairness, ease of use, onboarding speed, support quality, and innovation. Follow with open likes and what could be better. Include a question on why they stopped buying a brand and what would make them return. These competitor analysis key questions reveal what to fix, defend, or amplify.
Go-to-market and operations questions
How do competitors acquire, convert, and retain customers
Identify top-of-funnel channels, conversion levers, and onboarding flows. Ask which campaigns drive qualified traffic, which pages or assets win demos, and what activation milestones correlate with long-term retention. Map their content and SEO strategy to see content gaps you can fill to capture demand others miss.
How are teams, partnerships, and support organized
Ask about sales motion by segment, partner ecosystems, and post-sale coverage. How many people focus on marketing, sales, product, and success relative to revenue. Which service levels are promised, and how fast are responses and resolutions. These questions to ask for competitor analysis expose capacity and focus – clues to strengths and weak links.
Where to get reliable answers
Triangulate data from multiple sources. Review sites, community threads, social listening, and public changelogs reveal customer voice and feature velocity. SEO and paid media tools uncover competitive keyword analysis, content gap mapping, and link authority. Our SEO competitive analysis guide surfaces these opportunities end-to-end. Web archives and investor materials show pricing or strategy shifts. Interviews, win-loss calls, and mystery shopping yield nuanced truths. If you want real-time intelligence on keywords, backlinks, and traffic patterns, InSpace’s toolset tracks movements as they happen so you can respond before the market notices.
From insights to action
Turn research into a short list of bets with owners and deadlines. Prioritize issues that are both important and fixable, then outline the smallest experiment that can validate an edge – a pricing test, a new onboarding path, a focused content hub, or a partner play. If you need a primer on fundamentals, start with what competitive analysis is to align your team. Build a living competitor scorecard with a few leading indicators like share of converting traffic on priority keywords, win rate vs top rivals by segment, and time-to-value. Tie each competitive research question to a decision you will make, then schedule a cadence to refresh inputs monthly. The goal is to compound small, validated advantages, not to create a static report that ages on a shelf.
FAQs
What is a competitor analysis question
It is a focused prompt that helps you compare rivals on factors that influence decisions – for example pricing fences, time-to-value, or support responsiveness. Good competitive intelligence questions produce measurable answers you can turn into actions or tests.
What should you include in a competitor analysis
Cover market size and forces, brand and product positioning, pricing and packaging, customer perception and NPS, acquisition channels and funnel, retention levers, and operational signals like team focus and partnerships. Use a competition analysis questionnaire you can repeat each quarter.
What are the 4 criteria for competitive advantage
A useful filter is value, rarity, inimitability, and organization. Your edge should create customer value, be rare in your category, be hard to copy quickly, and be supported by your processes and teams. Use this lens to rank opportunities from your competitor research questions.
