How to use the Competitive Landscape Analysis agent skill

What the skill makes the agent do

An agent skill is a folder of instructions that an AI agent loads when a task matches it. This skill tells the agent how to structure competitive analysis instead of answering from general knowledge alone.

When it applies, the agent can build a positioning map on two key customer dimensions, look for white-space gaps, suggest ways to differentiate across product, service, brand and price, fill in competitor profile templates, and check whether a proposed advantage is actually defensible. Before doing market-force or blue-ocean work, it reads a reference file covering Porter's Five Forces and Blue Ocean Strategy.

• It is a method and template guide. It does not look up live competitor data.
• Facts such as current prices, funding or revenue must come from you or from sources you check.

How to install the competitive-landscape skill

Download the ZIP for the skill from the page you are reading. Then choose one of two routes.

For Claude Code, unzip the download into ~/.claude/skills/ to make it available in all your projects, or into a project's .claude/skills/ folder to limit it to that project.

For the Claude apps, upload the skill under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

• Personal install: ~/.claude/skills/
• Project install: .claude/skills/ inside your project folder
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills

Confirm the skill is in place

After unzipping, the skill folder should contain SKILL.md and a references folder holding market-forces-and-blue-ocean.md. SKILL.md is the file the agent reads first to decide whether the skill applies.

If the agent never seems to use the skill, check that SKILL.md sits directly inside the skill folder and that the folder is in one of the locations above.

• SKILL.md
• references/market-forces-and-blue-ocean.md

How to trigger the skill with natural requests

You do not need a special command. The skill's description lists the situations it covers: evaluating competitors, assessing market positioning, identifying sustainable advantages, and preparing competitive strategy analysis for a startup or investor pitch. Ask in those terms.

Give the agent your product, your customer and the rivals you know about. The more specific the request, the more useful the positioning work.

• Map our project management tool against its main rivals on price and complexity.
• Use Porter's Five Forces to assess whether our niche is attractive to enter.
• Is our onboarding speed a defensible advantage or something competitors can copy in a year?
• Help me write the competitive section of our seed pitch deck.

Example workflow for a pitch

A typical session starts with the agent choosing two dimensions customers care about, such as price and complexity, and plotting the competitors you name. It then points to white space and asks you to validate that the gap is a real customer need.

Next, it can fill in a profile for each of your top rivals, covering product, go-to-market, strengths, weaknesses and likely next moves. You supply the facts. The skill's template tells the agent what to ask for.

• Name 3 to 5 competitors and paste in what you already know about each.
• Ask for a positioning statement based on the gap you found.
• Test the advantage against the durability questions in the skill before it goes in a deck.

What the skill needs and what it runs

The skill lists no required dependencies. It does not run scripts and does not use the network. Everything it does happens in the agent's reasoning over the text you provide and the bundled reference file.

Because it has no live data access, any figure the agent writes about a competitor came from your message or from the model's general knowledge, which may be out of date. Check every number before it reaches investors.

• Requires: nothing listed
• Runs scripts: no
• Uses network: no

Safety notes and limits

The skill gives general frameworks only. It is not legal, regulatory or professional advice, so do not rely on it for legal or regulatory decisions.

Treat outputs as hypotheses. The positioning and pricing templates use illustrative example figures, and the agent may fill gaps with invented facts unless you supply real data. Verify competitor claims against primary sources such as company websites, filings or customer reviews before using them in investor materials.

• Do not present agent-generated competitor prices or funding figures as verified.
• Use the skill's suggested public sources, such as company websites, press releases, customer reviews and SEC filings, to check facts yourself.

Tips for better results

Give the agent real inputs. A list of named competitors with what you know about each produces far better maps than a request with no context.

Ask for one framework at a time. Run Five Forces for industry attractiveness, then a positioning map for the space, then the advantage test on your claimed edge.

• Paste in your own pricing page and competitor pricing you have verified.
• Ask the agent to flag any claim it cannot back with the data you supplied.
• Re-run the positioning map when competitors change their products, using the monitoring cadence in the skill as a guide.