A competitor's YouTube channel is the most candid thing they publish. The website is written by committee and revised until it offends nobody. The videos are a founder on a podcast talking for ninety minutes, a solutions engineer running a live demo that goes slightly wrong, a webinar where someone from sales answers an awkward question honestly because they forgot it was recording.
That material is public, it is detailed, and almost nobody in your organisation reads it — because reading it means watching forty hours of video.
The triage pass
The mistake is trying to watch the important ones. You cannot identify which are important without watching them, which is the trap.
Instead, run Bullet Points across every video on the channel. Two minutes each, no judgement calls, just coverage. Paste each URL at xyzyoutube.com — or type xyz in front of it.
What comes back is a searchable index of a year of someone's content marketing. Now you can see which videos actually contain substance, and only then do you spend real attention. Run Executive Summary on those, because findings-first prose is what you will paste into a channel or a doc.
What to read for
Raw summaries are not insight. Four things are worth extracting deliberately:
The words they use for themselves. Positioning language changes slowly and deliberately. If a company described itself as "workflow automation" in March and "AI agents for operations" in September, something happened — a funding round, a repositioning, a competitor they decided to fight. The vocabulary shift is the signal.
Objections they handle unprompted. When a demo pauses to explain why their approach is fine despite an obvious concern, that concern is costing them deals. They are pre-answering the thing prospects keep raising. That is your differentiator, handed over voluntarily.
Which features lead. The order of a demo is not accidental. What opens is what they believe wins, and what gets thirty seconds at the end is what they built because an enterprise customer demanded it.
Who they name. Customer logos, job titles, industries mentioned in passing. This is segment information that costs a lot to get any other way.
Where the substance actually is
Ranked roughly by information density:
Webinars and conference talks are the richest. Long, unscripted, and often featuring someone who is not from marketing.
Podcast appearances by founders come next. Founders on podcasts say things their comms team would remove — roadmap hints, honest assessments of competitors, the real origin story rather than the sanitised one.
Customer stories and case studies tell you which segment they are actually winning in, which is frequently not the one their homepage targets.
Polished product videos are the least useful. Heavily scripted, low new information. Triage catches this quickly, which is exactly what triage is for.
Beyond your direct competitors
The same workflow reads a category rather than a company.
Take the twenty most-viewed videos on your category's core search term and summarise all of them. You learn what the market has already been told, which arguments are now table stakes, and — most usefully — which obvious question nobody has answered. That gap is a content brief.
For turning what you find into your own published material, see the repurposing workflow.
Global competitors
Translation across 70+ languages means a Korean product launch or a Brazilian keynote is as readable as an English one. If your competitive analysis currently stops at the English-language boundary, you have a blind spot that costs nothing to close. See translate and summarize in one step.
One caution before it reaches a deck
Auto-captions mishear numbers. Pricing, growth figures, and customer counts are the highest-value and least reliable content in any summary.
If a figure is going into a strategy document, open the video and check that line. Being confidently wrong about a competitor's pricing in front of your leadership team is a specific and avoidable kind of bad day.
Pick your closest competitor's channel and triage their last ten uploads. An hour, and you will know more about their positioning than most of your sales team. Start here.