HomeBack to recipes
RecipesMarketingCompetitor Watch Automation

TL;DR

Competitor Watch Automation is a marketing workflow that chains Perplexity + Notion to automate a common task. Run daily Perplexity searches on competitors and log product updates, pricing changes, and news to a Notion tracker. Once configured, it saves ~8 hours/week per marketing/strategy lead, plus compounding intel advantage over quarters and runs through Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf or any MCP-compatible AI agent.

🔮📝
MarketingBeginner

Competitor Watch Automation

Run daily Perplexity searches on competitors and log product updates, pricing changes, and news to a Notion tracker.

8 min setup, daily competitive intelligence2 MCPs requiredSaves ~8 hours/week per marketing/strategy lead, plus compounding intel advantage over quarters

How it works

🔮Perplexity
📝Notion
Automated
1Daily cron: iterate over competitor list2Query Perplexity for latest news per competitor3Extract product updates and pricing signals+2 more steps
Hostable — runs in your browser2/2 MCPs hosted

Run with MCPizy

New

Execute this recipe in your browser — no local install, no Claude Code. Streams results live.

Whitelisted MCPs: perplexity, notion, anthropic, openai, tavily, firecrawl, coingecko, stripe, slack, github, gitlab, linear, resend, sendgrid, elevenlabs, shopify, sentry, posthog, supabase-mcp, context7, deepwiki~4k tokens  ·  ~$0.012 est.

Why this combo?

Perplexity searches the live web and surfaces cited, current information about any company; Notion accumulates those findings over time into a searchable competitor intelligence database. Together they replace the weekly task of manually Googling competitors with an automated daily briefing.

Without this workflow

Marketing intern Googles competitors every Monday morning, pastes findings into a Notion doc, misses things, falls behind when they're busy.

With MCPizy

Every competitor is searched daily. Findings auto-added to Notion with date and source. Weekly digest emailed to the team automatically.

Business value

Concrete ROI — not marketing fluff.

Time saved

~8 hours/week per marketing/strategy lead, plus compounding intel advantage over quarters

  • Catches competitor pricing changes within 24h — lets sales adjust pitch before losing deals to new positioning
  • Replaces $500-2k/month competitive intel SaaS (Klue, Crayon) with one script and a Notion page
  • Historical archive becomes strategic asset: trend analysis on competitor roadmaps guides your own
  • Eliminates the 'why didn't we know about this?' post-mortem when a competitor launches in your space

Workflow steps

  1. 1
    Daily cron: iterate over competitor list
  2. 2
    Query Perplexity for latest news per competitor
  3. 3
    Extract product updates and pricing signals
  4. 4
    Add entry to Notion competitor tracker database
  5. 5
    Weekly digest email to marketing team

Use cases

  • Daily news and product update tracking for up to 20 competitors
  • Pricing change detection when competitors publish new plans
  • Weekly competitive digest automatically emailed to the marketing team
  • Searchable archive of competitor activity going back months

MCPs required

🔮

Perplexity

Perplexity MCP Server

View
📝

Notion

Notion MCP Server

View

Agent prompt (copy into Claude Code)

This prompt is the workflow. Paste into Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf.

You are a competitor-watch agent. Runs daily at 07:00.

For each competitor in competitors.yaml (name, domain, product_category, aliases):
1. Build a query: "${name} (product launch OR pricing OR feature OR acquisition) after:${yesterday}"
2. Call perplexity.ask(query, search_depth="advanced", date_range="day", return_citations=true)
3. Parse response for signals: pricing_change | product_launch | funding | acquisition | integration
4. For each signal, call notion.notion-create-pages in COMPETITOR_DB with:
   - Competitor: name
   - Signal type: tag
   - Date: today
   - Summary: 2-3 sentences
   - Sources: citation URLs
5. Weekly on Monday 08:00, aggregate last 7d into a digest page + email via gmail.gmail_create_draft

If no signals detected, still log a "no change" row to maintain coverage record.

Trigger & credentials

How this workflow fires and what env vars you need.

.env.example
ScheduledTrigger
0 7 * * *  # daily 07:00 UTC + 0 8 * * 1 for weekly digest
🔮Perplexity· 1 var
PERPLEXITY_API_KEYGet key

Perplexity Pro API key

e.g. pplx-...

📝Notion· 2 vars
NOTION_API_KEYGet key

Notion integration token

e.g. secret_...

NOTION_COMPETITOR_DB_ID

Database ID for competitor tracker

e.g. a1b2c3d4e5f67890a1b2c3d4e5f67890

One-command deploy

Install everything — MCPs, prompt, env template — in a single call.

$ mcpizy recipe install perplexity-notion-competitor-watch

✓ Installs all 2 MCP servers
✓ Writes prompt to ~/.mcpizy/prompts/perplexity-notion-competitor-watch.md
✓ Generates .env.example in current directory
✓ Ready to paste into Claude Code

Requires mcpizy CLI v1.1+ — install via npm i -g mcpizy.

Quick install (MCPs only)

8 min setup, daily competitive intelligence
$ mcpizy install perplexity && mcpizy install notion

More Marketing recipes

🔥💬

Product Hunt Scraper Alert

Scrape Product Hunt daily with Firecrawl and send trending posts in your category to Slack so your team never misses a launch.

🔍

[Benchmark] Tavily News Search

Internal benchmark-only recipe: one Tavily search call, returns a short summary. Not intended for production use.

🔍

[Benchmark] Tavily 2-step Research

Internal benchmark-only recipe: Tavily search + answer for a topic, 2 tool calls.

🔍

[Benchmark] Tavily 3-query Multi-angle

Internal benchmark-only recipe: 3 Tavily searches on different angles of a topic, then synthesise.

Frequently asked questions

What is this workflow?

Competitor Watch Automation is a marketing automation that uses Perplexity + Notion together via the Model Context Protocol. Run daily Perplexity searches on competitors and log product updates, pricing changes, and news to a Notion tracker.

How long does setup take?

Setup takes around 8 min setup, daily competitive intelligence. You install the required MCP servers with `mcpizy install perplexity && mcpizy install notion`, connect your accounts, and the workflow is ready to run.

How much time does this workflow save?

Once running, this workflow saves ~8 hours/week per marketing/strategy lead, plus compounding intel advantage over quarters. The concrete business value: Catches competitor pricing changes within 24h — lets sales adjust pitch before losing deals to new positioning; Replaces $500-2k/month competitive intel SaaS (Klue, Crayon) with one script and a Notion page.

Which MCP servers do I need for this?

You need 2 MCP servers: Perplexity (mcpizy install perplexity), Notion (mcpizy install notion). All are installable in one command via the MCPizy CLI and configured in your `.claude.json` or `.cursor/mcp.json`.

Does this work with Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf?

Yes. The workflow runs with any MCP-compatible AI agent — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code with Copilot, and custom agents built on the MCP SDK. The MCP servers are identical across clients; only the config file path (`.claude.json` vs `.cursor/mcp.json`) changes.

Start building this workflow

Install the required MCPs from the marketplace and automate this in 8 min setup.

$ mcpizy install perplexity && mcpizy install notion

🔮Install Perplexity📝Install Notion

Free to install. Connect your accounts and this workflow runs itself.