Tip Tuesday: Stop Manually Checking Competitors — The AI Brief That Does It For Me

Every Monday I used to spend 90 minutes reading competitor blogs, scrolling Reddit, and copy-pasting notes into a Google Doc. Classic solopreneur time-sink. Now I spend zero minutes on it — an AI brief lands in my Airtable every Monday morning automatically.

Here is exactly how the system works, and how you can build a lightweight version today — no code required.

The Problem With Manual Competitor Research

Manual research does not scale. You check three subreddits, skim four competitor sites, and by the time you are done you have burned two hours — and half of what you read is irrelevant noise. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal for solo operators.

What you actually want: a weekly brief that surfaces only what moved this week — new competitor content, trending conversations in your niche, keyword shifts. Everything else: filtered out automatically.

The JonOps Market Intelligence Setup

In my autonomous brand stack (JonOps), I run a market-intelligence skill every Monday at 04:00. It does three things automatically:

1. Reddit scan: Hits the free Reddit .json API on target subreddits, pulls hot threads from the last 7 days, filters by keyword relevance to my niche
2. Competitor content check: Scans competitor sites for new posts published this week
3. Claude synthesis: Passes all raw data to Claude with one brief — “What moved this week? Keyword trends, competitor moves, audience sentiment. 5 bullets max.”

The output lands in Airtable as a structured record — a short summary, keyword opportunities spotted, and a relevance score. My blog-writer agent picks this up automatically when selecting this week is content topics.

Last week is run flagged that “agentic ai” had 110,000 monthly searches with near-zero solopreneur content in the top 10. Every competitor was writing for enterprise buyers. My agent caught it. That gap became this week is main blog post topic. I did not lift a finger.

Build Your Own Version in 10 Minutes

You do not need JonOps to get 80% of this value. Here is a manual-but-fast version you can run right now:

1. Pick 2-3 subreddits where your ideal clients hang out
2. Open reddit.com/r/[subreddit]/top/.json?t=week&limit=25 in your browser
3. Paste the JSON into Claude with this prompt: “You are my market intelligence analyst. Summarize what this audience is talking about this week, what problems keep coming up, and whether any competitors are mentioned. 5 bullets max, plain English.”
4. Add anything useful to your content calendar or keyword list

Takes about 10 minutes instead of 90. Not zero — but it is what autonomous AI agents are built for once you are ready to automate it fully.

What This Actually Gets You

The real win is not the time saved — it is the compounding intelligence. When you automate research, you catch keyword gaps and competitor moves before you would have spotted them manually. That is the difference between reacting and positioning.

For solopreneurs running lean, this kind of leverage is the whole game. You are not trying to outspend competitors. You are trying to out-see them.

Want to take this further? My Claude Code tutorial for beginners walks through how I wire automations like this into a system that runs while I sleep — no developer needed.