Setting Up Competitors

Contend sets up competitive intelligence automatically. You give it your website; it reads your site to build a company profile, then uses that profile to discover the companies you should be tracking. You review each prospect, confirm the ones that matter, and Contend begins monitoring them.

This page walks through that flow and how to get the most out of it.

Step 1 — Onboarding from your website

During onboarding, Contend asks for one thing: your website URL.

Contend reads your site and builds a structured model of your business — company description, problem and solution, target market, target audience, geographic focus, differentiators, and key features — and surfaces every field for you to review and refine. The whole analysis takes about 15–30 seconds.

If you don't have a website yet, you can skip that step and enter the essentials (company name, description, target market) manually. You can always come back and run the website analysis later from Settings → Profile.

Tip. The accuracy of your company profile directly determines the quality of competitor discovery. If the auto-extracted fields miss something important about who you serve or how you differentiate, edit them before moving on.

Step 2 — Discover competitors

Once your company profile exists, open Competitors → Prospects and click Discover Competitors.

Contend runs AI research agents against your company model — proposing candidate companies, evaluating each in parallel against your category, buyer, and differentiation, and returning the ones that genuinely compete with you. You can optionally add search guidance to steer them — for example:

Focus on real-time monitoring tools. Exclude general SEO platforms.

Prospects stream in as the agents evaluate them, each scored for relevance (direct, indirect, or tangential) with a plain-language rationale for why it's there. You review every prospect before anything enters monitoring.

Step 3 — Add specific competitors manually

You do not have to wait for discovery. At any point you can click Add Competitor and supply:

Name
Website URL
Optional: a note on how you found them

Contend will enrich the prospect the same way discovery does — pulling in data from across the web and scoring relevance — but the competitor is yours to confirm.

Step 4 — Confirm, monitor, or dismiss

Every prospect has three outcomes:

Confirm — add the company to your monitored list. Contend starts capturing signals across the tracked sources immediately.
Monitor — lighter-touch tracking for companies you want to keep an eye on without committing a full slot.
Dismiss — not relevant. Stays in Dismissed so you have a record and won't be re-surfaced.

The Prospects page has three tabs (To Review, Confirmed, Dismissed) so you always know the state of your queue.

Step 5 — Tune your monitored list

Your monitored list is not a one-time setup. Revisit it regularly:

Remove competitors that have stopped being relevant. Tracking a dormant competitor is noise.
Re-rank competitors using drag-to-reorder so your briefings surface the highest-priority companies first.
Tag competitors to group them (e.g., direct, adjacent, emerging) and filter by tag in Pulse and the comparison reports.
Re-run discovery when your positioning shifts. New entrants appear constantly; discovery with fresh guidance keeps the list current.

How many competitors to track

A tight list of the right competitors, tracked well, beats a long list updated occasionally. A sensible default across plans:

3–5 direct competitors — companies a buyer would seriously evaluate alongside you.
3–5 category-adjacent competitors — players in nearby categories that could expand into yours.
Up to 5 emerging or long-tail — early-stage companies or new entrants.

Fifteen is the upper bound for most teams. More than that and the signal-to-noise ratio drops.

Introduction — what Contend does and does not do.