As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly identify your UK small business's main competitors.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

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

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Write down your actual offer, service area, target customer, typical price range, buying occasion and the alternatives customers may choose instead.
   2. Open a chatbot or Perplexity and paste the prompt with those details, asking it to use current public sources and include a URL for every factual claim.
   3. Read the proposed market definition and change it if it excludes a customer group, nearby area, substitute or product category that matters to your sales.
   4. Open each cited competitor website and record whether it currently serves the same customer, area and need as your business.
   5. Search each competitor's name alongside your town, service, sector and relevant UK directories, then add credible omissions and remove firms that are not genuine alternatives.
   6. Put the surviving names into a spreadsheet with columns for direct or indirect status, location, offer, customer overlap, evidence URL and confidence.
   7. Ask the chatbot to re-rank the checked list using only the evidence in the spreadsheet, then compare its final ranking with your own knowledge of customer enquiries and lost sales.

   Prompt

   Identify the main competitors for this UK small business using current public information where available.
   
   Business: [business name or anonymous description]
   Location and service area: [town, region or UK-wide]
   What we sell: [products or services]
   Target customers: [customer type, sector and size]
   Typical price range: [price range or leave blank]
   How customers find or buy from us: [channels]
   Known alternatives or competitors: [names or leave blank]
   
   Define the market before listing competitors. Separate direct competitors, indirect competitors and substitutes. Produce a shortlist of no more than ten plausible competitors, then rank the five most relevant. For each, give its name, location or service area, offer, target customer, evidence of relevance and the public source URL. Do not claim market share, customer numbers, prices or rankings unless the source supports the claim. Mark anything uncertain as unverified. Explain the criteria used for relevance, including customer overlap, offer overlap, geography and price. Finish with a list of facts I must check myself before using this in a business decision. Use UK sources and write plainly.

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