Weekly Competitor Openings Digest by Store Location

Every Monday at 6am, run a competitor scan for each of my store locations and post a market intel digest to Slack.

My store list lives in Airtable. Use Airtable List Records to pull two tables:

1) A "Locations" table with one row per store. Each row has an address, a competitor category (for example "specialty coffee" or "boutique gym"), and a search radius in meters.

2) A "CompetitorSnapshots" table holding the prior week's nearby venues per store, so we can diff against it.

For each store in Locations:

- Use Geolocation Forward Geocode to turn the address into latitude and longitude.

- Use Geolocation Search Nearby Places with that location, the store's category, and the store's radius to find candidate competitor venues.

- For the top results, use Geolocation Get Place Details to pull rating, review count, opening hours, website, and Google Maps URL.

- Use your own judgment to filter out venues that don't actually match the competitor category (skip gyms when the category is coffee, skip chain pharmacies when we sell pastries, etc.). Category match is a reasoning step, not a hard string filter.

- Diff the cleaned list against the previous CompetitorSnapshots rows for this store. A venue counts as "new" if it wasn't in last week's snapshot, OR if its review count jumped enough to suggest it just opened. Skip stores where nothing changed.

- Use Airtable Create Records to refresh CompetitorSnapshots with this week's results for the store (so next Monday has a clean baseline). Batch in groups of 10.

- For each store that had new openings, use Slack Send a Message to post one digest message to the configured channel. The message should list each new competitor with its name, rating, review count, distance from the store, hours if available, website, and a Google Maps link. Add a one or two sentence take on how worried we should be, weighing rating, review count, and proximity. Higher rating plus closer distance equals louder warning.

If no store had any new competitor activity, send a single short "all quiet this week" Slack message instead of staying silent.

Ask me for: the Airtable base ID and the two table names, the Slack channel to post into, and reasonable defaults for what counts as a "meaningful" review count jump.

Additional information

What does this prompt do?

Checks the area around every store you operate and flags new competitor venues that have appeared in the last week.
Pulls each new venue's rating, review count, hours, and website so you can size up the threat at a glance.
Posts a Slack message per store with the new openings, a short risk read, and a Google Maps link for each spot.
Skips stores with no changes so the channel only lights up when something actually moved.

What do I need to use this?

An Airtable base with a Locations table (address, competitor category, search radius) and a CompetitorSnapshots table for tracking last week's results.
A Slack workspace and the channel where you want the weekly digest to land.
Your store list filled in with a category like "specialty coffee" or "boutique gym" so the agent knows what counts as a real competitor.

How can I customize it?

Change the schedule. Move it from Monday 6am to whatever day and time fits your weekly ops cadence.
Tune the search radius per store in Airtable so dense city locations look at a tighter area than suburban ones.
Adjust the "worry" criteria so the agent weighs rating, review count, and distance the way your team thinks about competitive threat.
Send a separate Slack message per store, or roll everything into one combined market intel post.

Frequently asked questions

How does it know a venue is new versus one we already knew about?

It compares this week's nearby venues against the snapshot it saved in Airtable last week. Anything that wasn't on the list before, or that suddenly jumped in review count (a sign of a recent opening), gets flagged as new.

Will it spam our Slack channel if nothing changed?

No. Stores with no new competitor activity are skipped entirely. You only get a message when there's actually something worth knowing about.

Can I run this on more than one store?

Yes. The agent loops through every row in your Locations table, so adding a new store is as simple as adding a new row with its address, category, and radius.

How does it decide how worried we should be?

It looks at the new venue's rating, review count, and distance from your store, then writes a short take. A highly-rated competitor two blocks away gets flagged louder than a mediocre one across town.

What if my category is something unusual like third-wave coffee or pilates studios?

Put your category in the Locations table in plain English. The agent uses that wording to filter out unrelated places (gyms when you sell coffee, restaurants when you run a salon, etc.).