Competitors

Competitors shows what rival products’ customers say in public reviews, then turns that evidence into themes, quotes, and opportunity teasers. This graph is separate from your first-party Insights and Themes — it does not mix into the rest of your customer feedback.

The page lives at Visualize → Competitors.

How you get access

New workspaces have Competitors turned on when you create the organization. After that, billing plan defaults cannot turn it off.

You can also unlock it by claiming a shared report. If someone from Deck sent you a competitive intelligence report, open the link (/r/... with a claim token), click Unlock Opportunities, and sign up or sign in with a matching company email. Deck turns Competitors on for that organization and takes you to Visualize → Competitors right away. The report copy itself continues in the background.

Organization admins can turn Competitors on or off later from Settings → Competitors. See Competitors settings.

If the page says Competitors is not enabled (for example, an older workspace that never claimed a report), ask an admin to enable it in Settings, or contact Deck.

Claiming a public report

A public report is viewable without signing in:

• Themes and evidence quotes are visible.
• Opportunity teasers stay behind a claim overlay until you unlock them.
• Search engines are told not to index the page.
• On the report overview, Ask your AI Agent / See Prompt copies a prompt that points at /r/{slug}.md. That markdown file is the same public report (competitors, sources, themes, and quotes). It does not include opportunity teasers — if an agent is asked about opportunities, it should send you to /r/{slug} to unlock them rather than inventing them.

Use the full link you were sent, including the claim token. After you unlock:

1. Deck checks that your email domain matches the company on the report.
2. If you already have a workspace, Deck claims the report into your active organization.
3. If you are new, Deck asks only for organization name, slug, and region (prefilled from the report).
4. You land on Visualize → Competitors as soon as the workspace exists. Importing the report can take a little while — Deck shows Agents at work until the themes, quotes, and opportunities are ready.

A brief network error during claim is not a dead end. Open Visualize → Competitors; the import may still be running.

Google or Microsoft sign-in returns you to the same report and continues the claim.

Using Competitors in the app

When research is ready, the page has three tabs:

Opening a subtheme or opportunity always uses a right-side drawer on desktop and mobile. Click an insight row in that drawer to see a lightweight competitor-insight view — name, quote, competitor, date, and sentiment — without leaving Competitors. Back returns you to the subtheme or opportunity. These rows do not open Deck’s first-party insight sheet; competitor insights are a separate graph.

An opportunity drawer lists matching insights 10 per page. Opportunity and Overview SWOT charts count each unique grounded insight’s own sentiment once (not the parent subtheme color), group dates by month (for example Jun 2026), and keep reviews without a usable date under Undated.

If the same theme ranks as both a strength and a weakness, Deck shows it only under Weaknesses. The last competitor you pick is stored in the page URL (?competitor=), so switching tabs or reloading keeps that company selected. The global segment filter is hidden on this page; competitor research is not first-party segment-scoped.

The page menu includes Feature Feedback. It opens a short form titled Feedback on Competitors so you can tell Deck what worked or missed the mark. Submissions land under Manage → Widgets. On compact widths, Settings and Feature Feedback stay in the same overflow menu instead of hiding behind a second ellipsis.

From a subtheme or opportunity-teaser drawer, you can Promote to Opportunity. Give the backlog item an opportunity name (prefilled from the drawer) and optionally turn on Find information on my own customer feedback. Deck then opens the new item in Opportunity Backlog. If first-party matching is still running, that detail page shows Agents at work until the extra evidence is attached. Promoting the same finding again returns the existing backlog item. Artifact wedges on the Opportunities tab can also be promoted.

First-time setup and adding competitors

If your workspace does not have a published competitor graph yet, Deck shows an inline setup: add competitors with name + website, they appear as chips, then start research. You can also add or remove competitors from Settings → Competitors.

• Adding a competitor starts research for that company and appends new public reviews onto the graph you already have. It does not replace the last published graph.
• While research runs, the last published graph stays on screen. Overview, Competitors, and Opportunities show a Researching Acme. (or Researching 2 competitors.) banner. On the Competitors tab, the new company appears as a disabled Acme (researching) row and Add stays unavailable until the run publishes or fails.
• A successful run merges new quotes into the graph. A failed or thin run leaves the previous graph unchanged, drops the researching picker row, and shows Retry on all tabs.
• Research uses public review sources (G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius by default).
• Claiming a report or starting competitor research also completes the general Upload feedback item on the header Setup checklist. A failed research job without a claim does not.

Credits

In-app research after signup uses credits:

• Deck estimates scrape volume before starting so a tiny remaining balance cannot kick off a large scrape.
• Each returned public review costs 1 credit. Agent work (relevance, themes, opportunities) uses the same token-credit path as other AI jobs.
• If overage is off and you do not have enough credits, the job does not run and your last published graph is left as-is.

Reports that Deck generates for sales outreach are not billed to your workspace.

See Billing & Credits for plan limits and overage.

Periodic check-ins

Organization admins can turn on periodic check-ins from Competitors settings. Deck then scrapes public reviews on a schedule and appends anything new onto the existing graph.

• Cadence is weekly (every 7 days), monthly (every 30 days), or quarterly (every 90 days). The default is monthly.
• The first check-in waits until your last successful research is older than that cadence. After that, Deck waits that many days from the last completed check-in.
• If research is already running, a due check-in waits. The schedule does not skip ahead.
• If there are not enough credits to scrape, the schedule stays on and the graph is unchanged. Deck tries again on the next due window.
• If no new reviews are found, Deck records an empty run, advances the next due date, and does not email anyone.
• When a check-in does find new reviews and finishes, every active workspace member with an email gets a notification. Empty and failed runs do not email.

There is no “run now”. Check-ins only work while Competitors is enabled. Turning Competitors off also turns check-ins off.

Public API and MCP

Most Visualize → Competitors reads and writes are also available with a write-enabled API key or through MCP:

• Public API: /competitors reads, POST /competitors/research, POST /competitors/promote, and check-ins (GET /competitors/checkins, GET /competitors/checkins/latest, admin POST /competitors/checkins). See Resource Reference.
• MCP: explore_competitors for reads (including check-in history) and mutate_competitors to start research, add a competitor, promote a finding, or — for organization admins — set the check-in schedule. See Model Context Protocol.

Both surfaces stay fail-closed if Competitors is off for the workspace. Research and check-in scrapes use credits the same way the in-app action does. Only organization admins can change the check-in schedule (403 ROLE_NOT_ALLOWED for members).

Enabling or disabling Competitors, and deleting a tracked competitor, are in-app Settings actions only. API and MCP cannot toggle the feature or delete a competitor.

Chat in Deck on Visualize → Competitors includes Competitors starter questions and page context. It can list and inspect check-ins (listCompetitorCheckins, getCompetitorCheckin). Changing the schedule from chat (setCompetitorCheckins) is admin-only after confirmation. Members can still start research, add a competitor, or promote a finding from chat after confirmation.

What is not in this release

Competitors does not yet include Slack/Linear/Jira sharing, a separate in-app “Generate opportunities” action (you can still promote findings and wedges into Opportunity Backlog), public self-serve report generation, mixing competitor insights into your main insights graph, date-range filtering on the Competitors page, or an Overview “what’s new” summary of the last check-in.