Look, I was sitting at a pub in Paddington last Thursday with a mate who runs a decent-sized landscaping outfit. He was fuming.
He’d just lost a massive commercial contract to a guy down the road who, frankly, does average work. My mate couldn't figure it out. He’s got better gear, better blokes, and he’s been in the game longer.
“How did he know exactly what to bid?” he asked me. “It’s like he’s reading my mind.”
He wasn’t reading his mind. He was just using better tools to see what was happening in the market.
That’s what we’re talking about today. In the corporate world, they call it “Competitive Intelligence.” In Brisbane, we just call it making sure you aren't the last one to know what’s going on.
Most small business owners I talk to think keeping an eye on the competition means occasionally checking the other guy's Facebook page or driving past their yard to see how many trucks are out.
That’s better than nothing, but it’s slow. And if you’re only reacting to what they did yesterday, you’ve already lost the job today.
AI has changed this. It’s not about robots taking over; it’s about having a pair of eyes that never sleep, watching every move your competitors make online so you can win more quotes.
The Old Way vs. The AI Way
Remember how we used to do this? You’d hear a rumour on-site that a competitor just dropped their prices. Or you’d see their ad in the local paper and think, “Right, I need to do that too.”
It was all guesswork and gut feel.
Don’t get me wrong, gut feel is important. You don’t survive five years in business without it. But gut feel plus actual data? That’s how you grow a business that buys you a beach house in Noosa.
When we talk about using AI and marketing automation, we’re really talking about speed.
If a competitor changes the pricing on their website at 2 AM on a Tuesday, an AI tool can tell you by 8 AM. If they start running a new set of ads targeting your specific suburb, you can know about it before the first person even clicks.
Approach 1: The "Manual" AI Search (The Cheap Way)
You don’t need to spend thousands to start. You can actually do a lot of this yourself using the free versions of things like ChatGPT or Claude.
I tell my clients to do this once a month. Take a list of your top three competitors. Go to their websites, copy their service descriptions, and paste them into ChatGPT.
Ask it: “What is this business promising that I’m not? Where are they weak?”
It’s amazing what you miss when you’re looking at a site yourself. You’re too close to it. The AI doesn’t care about their pretty photos; it looks at the words. It might point out that your biggest rival is offering a “24-hour turnaround guarantee” while you’re still saying “we’ll get back to you soon.”
That’s a gap. If you close that gap, you win more jobs because you’re actually answering what the customer wants faster than the other guy.
But honestly? Doing this manually is a pain in the neck. You’ve got a business to run. You aren't going to sit there copying and pasting text every Saturday morning.
Approach 2: The "Set and Forget" Monitoring
This is where it gets interesting for most of our clients. There are tools now that basically act like a private investigator for your business.
They watch your competitors' websites, their social media, and their Google reviews. Every time something changes, you get a simple summary.
Think about Google Reviews for a second. If your main competitor starts getting a string of 1-star reviews saying their “customer service has gone downhill” or “they never pick up the phone,” that is gold for you.
"Most business owners wait for their phone to stop ringing before they check what the competition is doing, but by then, you're already six months behind the market shift."
— Sarah Chen, SEO Specialist
Sarah’s right. If you see those bad reviews rolling in for the guy down the street, you immediately change your own ads to say: “Tired of being ignored? We answer every call within 3 rings.”
You’re hitting the customer’s pain point exactly when they’re feeling it. That’s how you swoop in and take the business.
Approach 3: Ad Transparency (Seeing Their Playbook)
One of the biggest wastes of money I see in Brisbane is small businesses throwing $2,000 a month at Google Ads without checking what everyone else is doing.
Google and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) actually have libraries where you can see every single ad your competitors are running. It’s all public.
But who has time to go through hundreds of ads?
We use AI tools to scrape all that info. It looks at the images they use, the headlines that are working, and—most importantly—where they are sending the traffic.
If they’re spending big money to send people to a specific page about “Emergency Hot Water Repairs,” you can bet your life there’s a lot of money in that niche right now.
Instead of guessing what people want, you just look at what’s already making your competitors money and do it better.
What This Actually Costs
Let’s talk brass tacks. You’re probably thinking this sounds like something only the big boys in the CBD can afford.
It’s not.
If you want to do the manual stuff, it costs you $0 and maybe an hour of your time.
If you want a proper setup where we monitor your top 5 competitors and give you a monthly report on exactly how to beat them, you’re looking at a few hundred bucks a month.
Compare that to the cost of losing just one big job. If you’re a builder, a plumber, or an accountant, one lost lead is worth way more than the cost of the intel.
The “So What?” – Why You Should Care
I’ve seen businesses double their enquiry rate just by changing a few lines of text on their site because they realised the competition was eating their lunch on a specific service.
It’s about not being blind.
When you know what the other guy is charging, what they’re promising, and where they’re failing, you stop competing on price.
You start competing on value.
You can say, “I know some other blokes are cheaper, but they don’t offer the 5-year warranty we do.” You only know to say that because you’ve seen that the cheap guy’s warranty is rubbish.
How to Start Without Wasting Time
Don’t try to track everyone. Pick the three businesses that annoy you the most. The ones you keep seeing on the first page of Google or the ones whose trucks you see in every driveway.
Start there.
1. Check their reviews. Use an AI tool to summarise what people hate about them. 2. Check their ads. See what they’re shouting about. 3. Fix your own backyard. If they’re faster than you, you need to stop losing sales to slow replies. AI can help with that too, but that’s a conversation for another day.
My Honest Take
Look, the world is getting noisier. There are more businesses than ever fighting for the same customers in Brisbane.
If you’re just doing what you’ve always done, you’re eventually going to get squeezed.
Using AI to keep an eye on the competition isn't “cheating.” It’s just being smart. It’s making sure you have the best information possible before you make a business decision.
I’ve seen too many good blokes go out of business because they had their heads down working so hard they didn't see the market shift around them.
Don’t be that guy.
At Local Marketing Group, we do this day in and day out. We don’t just give you a bunch of fancy graphs; we tell you: “Hey, your main rival just started a 20% off sale for June. Here’s how we’re going to counter it.”
That’s the difference between a marketing agency and a partner who actually wants you to make money.
If you want to know what your competitors are up to—and how to beat them to the next big job—let’s have a chat. We’ll sort out the tech so you can get back to running your business.
Reach out to us here: https://lmgroup.au/contact