Put your competitor research on autopilot

The problem

Competitor research eats time and produces nothing. You open Instagram to “study the niche”, watch reels until the algorithm wins, and close the app with a vague feeling and zero notes. The most valuable part, the comments, where the audience says exactly what it wants, is the part nobody has the patience to read.

What I run instead

Inside my Content OS, the Claude Code plugin that runs my content business from a Mac mini, competitor research is a scheduled agent loop:

1. A watchlist file holds the competitor handles I care about.
2. On a schedule, Claude Code scrapes each account’s recent reels and posts through Apify’s Instagram actors, comments included.
3. One agent per competitor tears down every post: the hook, the promise it makes, the format, and why it likely worked.
4. The same agent mines the comments for repeated questions, pain points, objections, and buying intent, in the audience’s own words.
5. Each run ends as a structured intel report dropped into my Obsidian inbox, where my second brain files it.

I read reports instead of scrolling feeds. The loop runs on my strongest model, because judging why a post worked is a reasoning problem, not a scraping problem.

Copy the loop

You don’t need my plugin. Paste this into Claude Code. An Apify token makes it stronger, public pages work without one:

Here is my competitor watchlist: @handle1, @handle2, @handle3.
Work through each account as a separate agent:
1. Pull the most recent posts and reels, including comments.
   Use Apify if APIFY_API_TOKEN is set, otherwise public pages only.
2. For each post extract: the hook, the promise it makes, the
   format, and why it likely worked.
3. From the comments, list repeated questions, pain points,
   objections, and buying intent, in the audience's own words.
4. Write one markdown report per account into my notes inbox
   folder. Never invent a metric: mark anything unverified.

Run it manually each morning, or ask Claude Code to put it on a schedule. Mine runs daily via launchd.

The ethics line

The loop has one hard rule baked in: adapt angles, never copy content. Take the structure and the hook type, then re-anchor them to something you actually built. Lifting a caption or a script verbatim is theft, and the audience smells it anyway. Keep the scrape volumes small and respect the platform’s limits: a handful of posts per creator is plenty of signal.

Do this now

1. Make a watchlist of your 3 closest competitor accounts.
2. Paste the prompt above into Claude Code and read the first report.
3. Steal one angle, not one caption, and post your version this week.