Performing manual research just to stay on top of what your competitors can take hours of precious time.
However, all those efforts aside, you might be feeling like you can’t keep up with all the work you have to do. Spreadsheets, bookmarks, screenshots contribute to the daily grind.
What if you can take all of those hours and compress it into minutes? What if you can research your competitors and get comprehensive insights automatically without spending days?
Google Gemini is an ideal collaborator for you if you want an AI competitive intelligence tool on a budget and with limited technical skills.
SWOT analyses, content calendars, and strategy decoding are just a few capabilities this LLM has.
In this article, I’ll take you through how I use Gemini for competitive anlaysis, including how you can prompt it to analyze marketing strategies, compare websites, and craft a content calendar. Let’s get into it!
What is Google Gemini?
Gemini is an AI chatbot based on an LLM (also called Gemini). Gemini was developed by Google AI and Google Deepmind and launched in February 2024 after the widely successful launch of ChatGPT by Open AI.
Like Open AI’s GPT-4, Gemini is a multimodal AI model family—meaning it can handle different modes of input (text, code, image, audio). As a result, it goes beyond the function of an LLM (understand and generate text) and can be used for complex tasks.
Gemini can answer questions, interpret documents, create reports, images, and videos, and summarize entire books.
Notably, Google was also the first to integrate long context windows into a chatbot.
A context window is the maximum number of tokens (a measurement of text or information) that an AI assistant can interpret and generate at once.
The larger the context window, the better, because it allows you to have longer conversations and the ability to feed more information into the chatbot. However, this also means the service becomes more expensive because it requires much more computing power.
As of now, Gemini 1.5 Pro has a one-million token context window. In comparison, Open AI’s GPT-4o has 128,000 tokens. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet also recently upgraded to one million tokens (previously it was 200,000).
Like Open AI’s GPT-4, Gemini is a multimodal AI model family—meaning it can handle different modes of input (text, code, image, audio). As a result, it goes beyond the function of an LLM (understand and generate text) and can be used for complex tasks.
Gemini has different models but their lineup is constantly evolving. These are the current models from most advanced to least advanced:
How to access Google Gemini
You can try Gemini for free even without a Google account. However, a Google account is recommended to save your chat history and upload files.
A free Google account gives you access to Gemini 2.5 Flash and limited access to Gemini 2.5 Pro. For full access to the latter, you have to upgrade to Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra.
To use Gemini without a Google account, go to gemini.google.com in your browser.
You can also download the Gemini app by going to the App Store or Google Play Store. Note that the Gemini mobile app requires you to sign up for a Google account.
To find the app, type Google Gemini in the search bar, then install the app.
How to use Gemini for competitor research and analysis
Use well-crafted prompts, as well as your personal research, if possible, to guide Gemini into producing a competitor analysis document.
Here is a sample conversation with a wide array of applications for any industry, plus some prompts you can try. Note that I am using Gemini 2.5 Pro the examples below.
Identify competitors
You can easily identify known competitors by using Gemini.
The prompt for this is simple. First introduce your business, then ask it for information about your key competitors. You may also specify your location for tailored findings.
Sample prompt:
I am a founder of a DTC ecommerce business specializing in mattresses. Perform a competitive analysis featuring my major competitors, including their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and other tactics.
Here’s what Gemini answered.
For each competitor it identified, it completed an in-depth competitor profile with strengths, weaknesses, and their strategies.
For example, it pinpointed that Purple’s brand invests heavily in video marketing and demonstrations that showcase the properties of their unique mattress tech.
Then, after the competitor profiles, Gemini made specific recommendations for a new DTC mattress business based on its research.
Tip: To make Gemini’s answer more applicable to you, ask it to use a specific competitor analysis framework such as SWOT analysis or Porter’s Five Forces.
Perform a SWOT analysis based on identified competitors
Let’s say you already know your competitors. You can take this further by linking your competitors’ websites and asking Gemini to do a thorough analysis.
In this example, I am pretending to be the Glossier owner and want a SWOT analysis of 3 competitors: Saie, Tower 28, and MERIT Beauty.
Sample prompt:
Please perform a competitive analysis of my business using the SWOT analysis framework. My business is a DTC makeup brand. Here's my website: www.glossier.com
These are the competitors I want to analyze:
Saie www.saiehello.com
Tower 28 Beauty www.tower28beauty.com
MERIT Beauty www.meritbeauty.com
The analysis should be focused on their marketing strategy, including their website, products, ads, content, and unique value proposition. You can also perform a content gap analysis.
Gemini came up with this:
Here’s how it broke down each competitor’s marketing strategy.
Conduct a website comparison
Next, I asked Gemini to do a website conversion analysis.
Sample prompt: Analyze their website conversion tactics
The information was detailed with sources for each piece of information. It even went beyond homepages and described product pages, the checkout process, and overall strategy.
Explore brand positioning and ad strategies
After, I asked for an analysis of their brand positioning and advertising.
Sample prompt: Analyze their brand positioning and advertising focus
Assess content and social media strategies
Next, I wanted to know more about competitors’ content strategy and social media presence.
Sample prompt: Analyze their content strategy and social media presence.
To tie it all together, I asked Gemini for a unified recommendation and analysis based on the competitor information it gave.
Sample prompt: Create recommendations for me based on my competitors' strategies and information. Create a comprehensive comparison and develop strategies based on their approaches.
Here are the results.
Create a content calendar
You can even ask Gemini to create a sample content calendar for you based on its findings.
Sample prompt: Create a content calendar for me based on your research.
Conduct a sentiment analysis
Aside from content, you can ask Gemini to perform a sentiment analysis of your brand versus your competitors.
It will pull from general public perception, common themes in reviews, and social media conversations. However, you still need to fact check this as it doesn’t cite its sources.
Sample prompt: Conduct a sentiment analysis of me vs. my competitors.
Summarize a competitor’s new product or feature
Has a competitor launched a new product or feature recently? You can ask Gemini to read through a competitor’s product or feature release and summarize it for you.
To do this, you have to upload the report to Gemini and ask it to summarize the data. It can create a report in seconds.
Plus, you can ask questions about your competitor’s product or feature based on the report.
This can be handy for a quick overview or as preparation for a meeting or more comprehensive strategy brainstorming.
Next steps
Remember that you can export your findings to a new Google Doc so you can revisit it at a later time, save it as a file, or do more detailed work on it.
To export, click the share icon beneath Gemini’s response and then select Export to Docs.
Tips for using Gemini in competitive analysis
Add your own research
Data is of utmost importance when training and requesting something from an AI assistant like Gemini.
While it can do a web search for you, Gemini’s output will be more accurate if you research real reviews, social media metrics and posts, blog titles, blog descriptions, and other components of their marketing strategy.
This is a more involved method but it ensures that the answers you get are a hundred percent reliable or close enough.
Be specific
Also, skip broad questions like “Perform a competitive analysis of my business vs. my competitors”. It helps to come prepared with a list of competitors and a specific analysis framework you want the AI chatbot to analyze or apply.
Simply put, AI tools like Gemini need a lot of guidance at the start. A better way to ask Gemini questions is to break down an overarching task (like competitive analysis) into smaller steps.
Learn to write effective prompts
Lastly, study how to make good prompts for Gemini because it affects the quality of the analysis you will get from it. Specificity is key with prompting. A good prompt is usually composed of:
- A task (what you want it to do)
- Context (additional details that will help Gemini understand the task like persona, target audience, etc.)
- Format (visual or writing style, number of options, a list, a table, etc.)
I hope this gets you started with using Gemini for your competitor research and analysis. While not completely accurate and without limitations, an AI chatbot can really speed up your processes and gets your brunt work done for you.
Ready to start your own competitive analysis? Grab your free competitive analysis template below.
If you want an even more targeted competitor tracking and analysis tool, Panoramata is highly recommended. Unlike Gemini or ChatGPT, Panoramata can track much more than information you can find on a search engine.
Find landing pages, SMS campaigns, email marketing campaigns, and email automations with this all-in-one competitor tracking platform. Try it out today and sign up for fre.
FAQs
Is Google Gemini free to use for competitor analysis?
Yes, you can access Gemini 2.5 Flash for free with a Google account, which is sufficient for basic competitor analysis tasks. For more advanced features and unlimited access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, you'll need to upgrade to a paid plan starting with Google AI Pro.
How accurate is Gemini's competitor analysis compared to manual research?
Gemini provides a solid foundation for competitor analysis, but it's most effective when combined with your own research and fact-checking. The AI can miss recent changes or nuanced details, so it's best used as a starting point that you then verify and expand upon.
Can Gemini analyze competitors' social media presence?
Yes, Gemini can provide insights into competitors' content strategies and social media approaches based on publicly available information. However, it cannot access private analytics or real-time engagement metrics, so you may need to supplement with manual observation.
