Competitor Array Template & Competitive Matrix Example

A competitor array scores your rivals on the factors customers actually buy on — weight each factor, score everyone 1–5, total it up, and you can see where you win and where you are exposed. A filled-in example and a copyable template are below. Want the fun version? Run a free 60-second scan and watch your real local competitors come back scored — no signup, no card.

What a Competitor Array Is

A competitor array — also called a competitive matrix, competitive grid, or competitive assessment — is a weighted scoring table. You list the factors customers decide on, weight each by how much it drives the buying decision, then score yourself and each competitor. The weighted total shows where you genuinely win and where you are exposed.

It beats a feature checklist because it forces two admissions: not every factor matters equally, and you are not best at everything.

Competitor Array Example

Here is a filled-in sample for a three-location dental practice comparing itself to two nearby rivals. The weights sum to 1.0, and scores run 1–5. The formula in every cell is the same: weight × score.

Success factor	Weight	You	Competitor A	Competitor B
Online booking convenience	0.25	3	5	2
Review volume & rating	0.25	4	4	3
Price transparency	0.20	5	2	3
Evening / weekend hours	0.15	2	4	5
Insurance acceptance	0.15	4	3	4
Weighted total	1.00	3.65	3.75	3.20

The interpretation matters more than the table. This practice wins decisively on price transparency and loses on evening hours — so the move is either to extend hours or to market transparency hard enough that it outweighs convenience for the customers who care.

How to Build Your Own, Step by Step

1. List 5–7 success factors. Only what customers actually choose on. Not what you are proud of.
2. Weight them. Weights must sum to 1.0. If everything is 0.2, you have not made a decision.
3. Pick 2–4 real competitors. Direct rivals your customers genuinely consider — not the national brand you will never lose a customer to.
4. Score 1–5 from evidence. Their website, their pricing page, their reviews, their hours. Not memory.
5. Multiply and total. Apply the formula — weight × score per cell — then sum each column. That column total is the competitor’s weighted assessment score.
6. Write the "so what." One paragraph naming where you win, where you are exposed, and what changes because of it.

Where to Find Real Competitor Data

The scoring is only as good as the evidence. For a local or service business, the data that matters is public and changes constantly:

• Their pricing page — the single most-changed page on any competitor's site.
• Review platforms — volume and recency, not just the star rating.
• Their service and hours pages — new services and extended hours are the clearest expansion signals.
• Hiring pages — a competitor staffing up for evenings tells you their next move before they announce it.

A one-time array is accurate the day you build it and stale a month later. A competitor who drops prices or adds Saturday hours changes your weighted totals — and nothing tells you it happened.

A Real Service Comparison Matrix

The array above scores competitors on weighted factors. A service offering matrix is the other half: a plain grid of who advertises what. It answers a narrower question — what do rivals publicly offer that I do not — and it is usually the faster path to an action you can take this week.

Below is a real matrix from a MyIntelBrief daily brief for a med spa. Business names are illustrative; the structure is exactly what a monitored business receives. A ✓ means the service is advertised on that company's public website, ✗ means it was not found.

Based on what each business advertises on its public website. A ✗ on your own row often means your site does not mention it — not that you do not offer it. That distinction is itself useful: an unadvertised service is invisible to a shopper comparing you.

Reading the matrix

The rows sort themselves into three groups, and each implies a different action:

• Everyone has it, you do not. Laser hair removal: 6 of 6 advertise it, you do not. Either a genuine gap in your menu, or a service you offer and never listed. Both are fixable; only one costs money.
• Nobody has it, you do. Nothing in this example — which is itself the finding. This business has no advertised differentiator.
• Table stakes. Botox and free consultations are universal. Competing on them is competing on nothing.

The single most actionable line here is online booking: only 2 of 6 advertise it. In a market where most rivals have not moved, that is a cheap advantage still available — the sort of finding a weighted array surfaces as a low score but does not explain.

What the Same Market Looks Like Monitored Daily

The matrix above is one card from one morning's brief. Here is what the rest of that brief covered for the same Eagan med spa market. The format is exactly what a monitored business receives; the business and competitor names are illustrative, and you can read the whole brief here:

Read the full sample brief →

Or stop reading about it. Start a 7-day trial and this arrives for your own business tomorrow morning — nothing to build, nothing to score by hand.
Still want to kick the tyres first? Free scan, 60 seconds, no signup.

Keeping the Array Current

Most owners build a matrix once, file it, and never update it. That is the real failure — not the scoring method.

Monitoring the same pages you scored from turns a one-time exercise into a standing view: when a competitor changes price, adds a service, or starts hiring, that is a cell in your grid changing value.

Why This Is Different From Doing It Yourself

Everything above is work. Scoring seven factors across six competitors means reading six websites, six pricing pages, six service menus, and the review profiles behind them — then doing it again next month to find out what moved.

Done properly and daily, this is most of a job. Reading a competitor set, checking what changed since yesterday, separating a real move from noise, and writing up what matters is three to four hours of someone's day, every day. That is why almost nobody does it: not because the value is unclear, but because the cost is a headcount most small businesses cannot justify for a task with no deadline attached.

The hard part is not gathering — it is discarding

The instinct is that monitoring is a collection problem. It is not. Collecting competitor mentions is easy, and it produces a feed nobody reads, because the same competitor's same pricing page shows up every single day looking exactly like news.

The difficulty is deduplication and discernment — deciding that today's item is genuinely new rather than yesterday's story wearing a different URL. Two things make that harder than it sounds:

• The same story arrives with different addresses. Tracking parameters, link shorteners, and syndication wrappers mean one announcement can appear a dozen times with a dozen distinct URLs. Matching on the raw link marks all twelve as new.
• Genuine follow-ups look like repeats. A competitor who cut prices Monday and extended hours Thursday has made two moves. Filtering too aggressively hides the second one.

MyIntelBrief canonicalizes every source — stripping tracking parameters, resolving shorteners, and rejecting links too opaque to identify a story — so the same item is recognized across days regardless of how it arrives. When identity cannot be established with confidence, the system is deliberately built to show rather than suppress: a repeat you can skim costs a few seconds, while a hidden competitor move can cost a customer.

The result is a brief where the absence of an item is information. If a competitor is not in today's brief, nothing about them changed — and that is only trustworthy if the filtering is conservative in the right direction.

What that changes about the array

A competitor array built by hand is accurate the day you finish it. Kept current by daily monitoring, it becomes something else: a standing measure of your position that updates when a cell's value actually changes, without anyone spending a morning re-checking six websites to find out that nothing did.

Common Mistakes

• Equal weights. If every factor is equally important, the array tells you nothing you did not already know.
• Scoring yourself a 5 on everything. An array with no honest weakness is marketing, not analysis.
• Choosing flattering competitors. Comparing against the weakest rival in town produces a comfortable, useless grid.
• No interpretation. A table with no "so what" paragraph wastes the strongest exhibit you have.
• Never updating it. The most common of all, and the one that quietly makes every other effort worthless.

Common Questions

What is the competitor array formula?

Weighted score = weight × rating, summed down each column. Assign each success factor a weight between 0 and 1 (all weights must total 1.0), rate every company 1–5 on that factor, multiply the two, and add up each company's cells. In the example above, Competitor A totals 3.75 against your 3.65 — the formula is deliberately simple, because the judgement lives in which factors you pick and how you weight them, not in the arithmetic.

How many competitors should a competitive assessment include?

Two to four for a hand-built grid. Fewer than two gives you nothing to compare; more than four and the scoring degrades because you cannot research them all carefully. Pick the rivals your customers actually consider — not the national chain you will never lose a customer to.

How many success factors should I score?

Five to seven. Below five you are missing what drives the decision; above seven the weights get so thin that no factor moves the total. If every weight is landing near 0.1, you have not decided what matters.

How often should you update a competitive grid?

The scores go stale as soon as a competitor changes a price, adds a service or extends their hours — which is why most hand-built grids are wrong within a month. Either re-check every competitor's site monthly, or monitor the same pages continuously so a cell changes value the day the competitor changes it.

What is the difference between a competitor array and a SWOT analysis?

A SWOT describes one business in four buckets. A competitor array compares several businesses on the same weighted factors, so it produces a ranking rather than a description. They answer different questions: SWOT asks "what are we like", the array asks "where do we stand".

Is a competitor array the same as a competitive matrix?

In practice yes — competitor array, competitive matrix, competitive grid and competitor comparison matrix all describe the same weighted scoring table. "Array" is the term used in academic strategy texts; "matrix" and "grid" are more common in business use. The service comparison matrix further up this page is a related but simpler tool: it records who advertises what, with no weighting or scoring.

Where can I find a competitor array template?

The filled-in example above is the template — copy the structure, swap in your own success factors, weights and competitors. The harder part is the evidence behind the scores, which has to come from each competitor's public pages, pricing and reviews rather than from memory.

The Bottom Line

A useful competitor array is built on a handful of weighted factors customers actually decide on, scored from real evidence, and followed by an honest read of where you win and where you are exposed. Build it once with the template above — then keep it current, because a competitive matrix describes a market that does not hold still.