For business owners
Best Skills for market and competitor research
The best Skill for competitor research is competitive-brief: it produces a positioning and messaging comparison with content gaps, opportunities, and threats — the document you use to decide where to compete, and the battlecard your sales conversations then run on. Around it, user-research plans the questions worth asking customers, research-synthesis turns the transcripts and survey results into themes instead of a pile of quotes, and seo-audit shows what your market types into a search box.
All four are Anthropic-published, MIT-licensed, and verified on Claude.ai — the entire research loop runs in a browser conversation, and each step hands you a document rather than a chat log.
Updated August 26, 2026 · first published August 26, 2026
Top pick
competitive-briefResearches competitors and returns a positioning and messaging comparison with content gaps, opportunities, and threats — structured for a decision rather than a summary, and reusable afterwards as a sales battlecard.
You get: A positioning comparison with gaps, opportunities, and threats.
Ranked
The shortlist
Every Skill below is catalogued with verified Claude.ai compatibility, so each one installs through the browser with no terminal. Ranked by fit for the common case — open a skill page for its composite score, license, and install commands for other agents.
| Skill | Source | What you get | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| competitive-brief | Official | A positioning comparison with gaps, opportunities, and threats. | You need to decide where to compete, or a competitor just moved and you need a read on it. |
| user-research | Official | An interview guide or survey design, and a research plan. | You have not spoken to customers systematically yet and need the questions to be worth asking. |
| research-synthesis | Official | Themes and insights with recommendations, traced to the source material. | You have a stack of interviews or survey responses and no time to cluster them. |
| seo-audit | Official | An SEO audit with keyword opportunities and content gaps. | You want to know what your market searches for and where competitors already answer it. |
All Skills that run without a terminal are listed together in one collection.
Why these
Pick by pick
- 1competitive-brief
Researches competitors and returns a positioning and messaging comparison with content gaps, opportunities, and threats — structured for a decision rather than a summary, and reusable afterwards as a sales battlecard.
Best when: You need to decide where to compete, or a competitor just moved and you need a read on it.
- 2user-research
Plans and runs the study rather than just processing it: interview guides, usability tests, survey design, and framing the research question so the answers are usable. Built for teams with no dedicated researcher, which is every small business.
Best when: You have not spoken to customers systematically yet and need the questions to be worth asking.
- 3research-synthesis
Turns transcripts, survey results, usability notes, or NPS responses into themes, insights, and recommendations. This is the step founders skip because clustering by hand is slow, and skipping it is why research folders go unread.
Best when: You have a stack of interviews or survey responses and no time to cluster them.
- 4seo-audit
The demand-side view: keyword research, on-page analysis, content gaps, technical checks, and competitor comparison. It tells you what your market actually types into a search box, which is often at odds with how you describe yourself.
Best when: You want to know what your market searches for and where competitors already answer it.
No terminal
Installing these on Claude.ai
Four steps in the browser. You are not writing code — the whole install is a file upload in your account settings.
- 1
Turn on code execution
On claude.ai, open Settings → Capabilities and enable "Code execution and file creation". Skills that produce files need it, and it is off for some accounts by default.
- 2
Download the skill folder
Follow the source link on the skill page to its repository and download the skill’s folder. Read the SKILL.md before you install it — it is plain text, and it is the instructions the agent will follow.
- 3
Zip it and upload
Compress the folder into a .zip, then on claude.ai go to Customize → Skills and upload it. Skills you upload are private to your account.
- 4
Ask for the work
Start a normal conversation and describe the job in your own words. The skill loads itself when your request matches what its description covers — you never invoke it by name.
Anthropic documents this flow in Use skills in Claude. Plans and menu labels change — if a label has moved, the support article is the source of truth, not this page.
Limits
What these will not do
- These structure and synthesize research; they do not have a live market-data subscription. Nothing here reads Crunchbase, SimilarWeb, or an ad platform on its own.
- Competitor findings are a strong draft, not sourced fact. Verify a claim before it goes into a deck, a sales call, or a pricing decision.
- seo-audit analyses what you give it and what it can reason about. For live rank tracking and keyword volume you need a platform — the catalog lists SE Ranking’s own skill suite for that, and it is not a no-terminal install.
- research-synthesis needs input. It clusters transcripts, survey answers, and notes you supply; it cannot go and talk to your customers.
FAQ
Common questions
What is the best AI for competitor research?
competitive-brief, Anthropic’s competitive research skill. It researches competitors and returns a positioning and messaging comparison with content gaps, opportunities, and threats — structured for a decision rather than a summary. It is verified on Claude.ai, so it installs in the browser with no terminal.
Can it tell me how big my market is?
Not reliably, and you should not ask it to. These Skills have no market-data subscription: they structure reasoning and synthesize what you provide. Use them for positioning, messaging gaps, and customer insight — and get sizing from a source you can cite.
I have twenty customer interviews and no time. What do I install?
research-synthesis. It turns interview transcripts, survey results, usability notes, or NPS responses into themes, insights, and recommendations — which is the step most founders skip because clustering by hand is slow. Upload the transcripts to the conversation and ask for the synthesis.
What is the difference between user-research and research-synthesis?
They are the two halves of the same loop. user-research plans and runs the study — interview guides, usability tests, survey design, framing the question properly. research-synthesis processes what comes back. If you have not talked to anyone yet, start with the first; if you have a folder of transcripts, start with the second.
Does the SEO part replace a real SEO tool?
No. seo-audit is a strong structural audit — keyword ideas, on-page analysis, content gaps, technical checks, competitor comparison — and it is free. It does not have live rank or volume data. When you need that, the catalog lists SE Ranking’s official skill suite, which is developer-installed and requires a platform subscription.
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