How to put competitor intelligence in a client report

Most agency reports fail at the competitor section in one of two ways. Either there is no competitor section, or there is a screenshot of somebody else's dashboard with no interpretation.

The version that works is one page and follows the same four part shape every month.

The one page format

1. What changed, six bullets maximum

Facts with dates. No adjectives.

Notice these are checkable. A client can click through and verify every one, which builds the trust that lets them accept your interpretation.

2. What it means, one sentence each

This is what you are paid for. A tool can produce section 1. Nobody but you can produce section 2.

Keep it to one sentence. If it needs a paragraph, it belongs in a separate document.

3. What we are doing about it, two or three actions

Owned and dated.

That third line matters. A report where every action belongs to the agency reads like busywork. A report that occasionally asks the client to decide something reads like a partnership.

4. One number, tracked all engagement

Pick one and never change it. Options that work:

• Share of the keywords you both target where the client ranks higher.
• Share of AI answers naming the client versus each named competitor.
• Number of competitor pages published versus the client's.

The specific number matters less than that it appears every month with the previous months beside it. A metric with twelve months of history is persuasive. A metric that appeared this month is decoration.

What to leave out

Everything the tool collected. You will be tempted. Resist it. Forty data points produce zero engagement; six produce a conversation.

Estimated ad spend. Every figure in every tool is modelled, they differ by a factor of three between vendors, and one day a client will check. Report ad duration and creative volume instead, which are observable facts.

Follower counts. Nobody has ever made a decision from a competitor's follower count.

Screenshots of dashboards. Your report should look like your report.

The section that renews retainers

If you add one thing to your reporting this year, make it AI visibility.

Ask twenty buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Record who gets named. Put the client and their three competitors in one small table.

No client has seen this before. The reaction is unlike anything a ranking report has produced in a decade, because it is concrete, it is about their buyers, and the gap is obvious without explanation.

Then, crucially, show the fix: the list of sources those answers cited, and which ones the client is missing from. That converts alarm into a scope of work, which is the whole point.

The time problem

Doing this properly takes about two hours per client per month: sitemap diffs, ad libraries, rankings, twenty AI questions across four assistants.

Two hours for two clients is fine. For twelve clients it is most of a week, every month, and it will be the first thing dropped when something urgent lands.

That arithmetic is the entire case for tooling here. Figo Agency is $249 a month for twenty competitors across five client workspaces, with your logo on the report and a Monday briefing emailed to each client under your name. Semrush from $139 a month plus per seat charges is deeper on search data and does not cover ads, social or AI answers.

Whatever you use, write section 2 yourself. The facts are commodity. The sentence after each fact is the retainer.