How to check local competition - step by step

You check local competition by gathering data from public sources - Google Maps, company registers and industry portals - and then organizing it so it shows how many companies operate, how they’re rated and where there’s a gap. The most important step isn’t gathering the data, but cleaning it: removing duplicates, inactive and outdated entries, so the conclusions rest on the real state of the market and not on noise.

Below: where to look, what exactly to measure, how to read the result, and when it’s worth outsourcing the analysis instead of doing it by hand.

Where to look for public data

You start with sources that are open and available to anyone:

• Google Maps and business profiles - names, addresses, ratings, review counts, opening hours, photos.
• Company registers - CEIDG and KRS show who actually runs a business and since when.
• Industry portals and directories - often hold data that isn’t on the maps.
• Competitors’ websites - offer, price list (if public), scope of services, online presence.

The rule is simple: you use what’s public. You don’t buy databases and you don’t touch leaked data - it’s a matter of both legality and quality.

What exactly to collect

For the data to reveal anything, it’s worth collecting a consistent set for each company:

• the number of companies in a given industry and location,
• the average rating and number of reviews,
• opening hours and activity,
• location (district, city, region),
• online presence (whether they have a website at all).

That turns “it feels like there’s a lot of competition” into a concrete, comparable table.

The most important step: cleaning the data

Raw search results are only the raw material. The real value comes from curation: removing duplicates, inactive companies, outdated and junk entries. It isn’t an automatic export - it’s the tidying up that leaves only real, operating entities.

Scale makes the difference here. In one of our market analysis projects, from about half a million raw results for a single industry, 2,874 verified, active companies remained in one region. The rest were duplicates and noise. Without that step, the conclusions would rest on data most of which doesn’t exist.

How to read the result

Organized data answers three questions:

• Where is it crowded? A saturation map shows which places are overfilled with the industry.
• Where are the white spots? Areas with few companies or weak, low-rated competition are opportunities to enter.
• Who’s the leader and who barely exists? Segmenting by ratings and review counts shows the real strength of the players.

On that basis a decision - where to open a location, which region to enter, whom to sell to first - stops being intuition and becomes a choice backed by data.

By hand or outsourced

For a dozen or so companies in one city you’ll manage on your own - a spreadsheet and an hour of work is enough. The problem starts at scale: hundreds or thousands of entities in a region mean dozens of hours of clicking and retyping, and then the manual cleaning on top. There, manual work stops paying off - and it’s worth outsourcing the collection and curation of the data to get a ready, clean set instead of losing weeks.

Summary

Checking the competition isn’t guessing - it’s gathering public data, cleaning it and reading the saturation map. For a small scale you’ll do it yourself; for a whole region it pays to outsource. In both cases the goal is the same: to know where it’s worth it before you spend money.

If you need a ready, clean market analysis for your industry and region - see how BizRadar works. You get data ready for decisions, not a raw export.