As of 13 August 2026, AI can find your UK business competitors.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Write down your website, main offer, target customer, places served, typical price range and the customer problem you solve.
   2. Open a current web-enabled chatbot or Perplexity and paste the full prompt with those business details filled in.
   3. Save the returned shortlist, comparison table and every cited source URL in a working document.
   4. Open each cited competitor website and check the business name, offer, target customer, geography and any stated prices against the AI's claims.
   5. Remove businesses that do not compete for the same customer, add any obvious competitors the model missed, and label any information that remains inferred or unknown.
   6. Ask the model to revise the table using your corrections, then send the final shortlist to a colleague who understands your market for a second relevance check.

   Prompt

   Find my likely UK business competitors using current public web sources.
   
   My business:
   - Business name: [business name]
   - Website: [website URL]
   - What we sell: [products or services]
   - Target customers: [customer type, industry or job role]
   - Geographic market: [UK-wide or specific regions and towns]
   - Typical price range: [price range or unknown]
   - Main customer problem solved: [problem]
   - Important search terms or categories: [terms]
   
   Return:
   1. A shortlist of 10 likely competitors, split into direct competitors, indirect competitors and adjacent alternatives.
   2. For each business, give its name, website, location or UK coverage, target customer, relevant offer, apparent price position if publicly stated, and the evidence for including it.
   3. Cite the specific public source URL for each factual claim. Use the business's own website where possible and separate sourced facts from your inferences.
   4. Explain why each business competes for the same customer, rather than merely operating in the same broad industry.
   5. Identify likely omissions or uncertainty, including businesses that may be local, newly launched, poorly indexed or operating under a different category.
   6. End with a comparison table covering offer, customer, geography, price position, apparent strengths and apparent weaknesses.
   
   Do not claim the list is exhaustive. Do not invent prices, customers, market share, revenue, rankings, reviews or weaknesses. If a fact cannot be verified from a public source, mark it as unknown. Ask up to three clarifying questions only if the information above is insufficient to distinguish direct competitors from adjacent businesses.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.