Competitive intelligence glossary

Competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the ongoing process of gathering and acting on public information about rivals and markets — a continuous practice.

CI draws on public sources: competitor websites and pricing pages, press releases, job postings, product changelogs, review sites, social media, and industry reporting. Ethical CI relies exclusively on public, legally accessible information — it is not corporate espionage, and does not involve deception or access to confidential material.

A mature CI practice has three parts: collection (gathering signals as they happen), analysis (turning signals into findings a team can trust and act on), and distribution (getting the right insight to the person who needs it — sales, product, or leadership — before it's stale). Most programs are stronger at collection than distribution.

The most common failure mode is treating CI as a research exercise instead of a decision-support one: a report nobody reads is not competitive intelligence, it's a document. The programs that survive tie every finding to a specific downstream action or decision-maker.

Where Dozier fits

Dozier is built around that collection-analysis-distribution loop end to end: Sweep collects and cites findings from the live web, and Radar keeps the loop running so the intelligence doesn't stop at a single report.

See Sweep

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