How the You.com Search API Empowers Competitor Intelligence for Retailers

Retailers have tracked competitors for decades. Historically, crawler-based tools scrape prices, promotions, and catalogs, taking static snapshots. Then, the heavy lifting is left to the analysts and other tools, which requires dedicated time and resources. 

This manual workload impacts retailers’ ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions, resulting in lost market share, reduced margins, inventory pile-ups, poor customer experience, and more. 

But the landscape is shifting. With the advent of AI agents using modern APIs that combine search and LLM reasoning, competitor insights can evolve from static snapshots into continuous, actionable intelligence.

How Do AI Agents Make Competitor Insights Actionable?

AI Agents convert noisy inputs into decision-ready insights using the four S’s: search, summarize, synthesize, and scenario-model. 

• Search: Discover comprehensive information about competitor pricing, promotions, and customer reactions at a hyper-local level. 
• Summarize: Collapse hundreds of documents into a one-page briefing.
• Synthesize: Connect competitor actions with customer reactions.
• Scenario-model: “If Competitor A discounts deeper than last year, how will market share shift?”

Instead of dashboards full of links and numbers analysts then have to make sense of, LLMs deliver complete narratives. For example,“This year’s promotions are broader but less deep. Customers are lukewarm. Focus our Black Friday play on bundles, not pure discounts.” 

You.com and its web AI Infrastructure provide the backbone of modern AI APIs to provide this end-to-end actionable intelligence to retailers.

You.com Web Search API Overview

Let’s explore how this best-in-class Search API provides the initial building blocks of competitive intelligence to deliver comprehensive, LLM-ready insights that can be easily translated into actionable intelligence.

You.com has three API’s that enable search and gather the relevant information:

• News API:  An API that retrieves responses from news media websites that are relevant to the users’ queries.
• Content API: An API that returns the entire target webpage in either html or markdown format
• Search API: An Intelligent API that returns LLM-ready web results based on users’ queries 

The Search API not only enhances keyword search with semantic search to return highly relevant and accurate results, it, where applicable, returns both web results and news associated with the query to ensure true 360-degree coverage of results. Essentially, the Search endpoint combines the power and impact of the News and Content APIs.

Retailer Scenario Background

Imagine you are an analyst at a local mom-and-pop grocery store. It’s September and you’re tasked with identifying the pricing and promotions strategy for the upcoming Halloween month. There are a couple of major retailers in the same zip-codes that your target customers visit and you want to understand the pricing and promotion strategy adopted by them.

The following tutorial shows how You.com can transform your price-setting workflow.

Step 1: Define the Parameters for Your Search Query

params = {

   "query": "halloween candy pricing and promotions",   

#---> The search string

    "count": 10,  #---> The number of search results. Can be a 100

"freshness": "week", #---> The ‘freshness’ of the results. Can be year, month, week and day. For this use-case, you want to review updates made by your competition in the last week

     "country": "US", #---> The country which you want to focus on

    }

Executing this search, returns 10 different results. Here is one of those 10 results:

Two invaluable sources of information in the results are:

• The description node that provides a brief summary about that webpage/pdf/etc. 
• The snippets node that provides additional details about the contents of the webpage/pdf/etc. In this instance, Snippets is providing information for four different Halloween SKU’s and associated pricing from the Walmart Halloween candy webpage

These two datapoints (description, snippets) are what distinguish the You.com Search API result set from a Google Serp API or Bing search. These datapoints make the You.com result set LLM-ready and user-friendly since a downstream LLM can gather enough context from description and snippets to make business decisions in most scenarios.

Step 2: Refine Your Search

Now, back to the task at hand. The result set has information from Walmart, Costco, Kroger, etc., but your retailer is only interested in what Target is doing. How do you limit the result set to just Target?

The refined and updated search would look like this:

params = {

   "query": "halloween candy pricing and promotions site:target.com",   

#---> The search string with an explicit operator to limit the search to just target.com

    "count": 10,  #---> The number of search results. Can be a 100

"freshness": "week", #---> The ‘freshness’ of the results. Can be year, month, week and day. For this use-case, you want to review updates made by your competition in the last week

     "country": "US", #---> The country which you want to focus on

    }

The search result is now limited to just webpages from Target.com which is exactly what you, the retailer analyst, is looking for.

The snippets in this result set provides information about the various SKU’s that are being promoted but you, the research analyst, want more—you want the actual prices. 

The Search API can be adjusted to bring back the contents of the entire webpage, which includes the prices, in the result.

Step 3: Refine Your Search Further

To get the prices in the results, the Search API can be adjusted to retrieve the contents of the entire webpage, which includes the prices.

The refined and updated search is:

params = {

   "query": "halloween candy pricing and promotions site:target.com",   

#---> The search string with an explicit operator to limit the search to just target.com

    "count": 10,  #---> The number of search results. Can be a 100

"freshness": "week", #---> The ‘freshness’ of the results. Can be year, month, week and day. For this use-case, you want to review updates made by your competition in the last week

     "country": "US", #---> The country which you want to focus on

“livecrawl”: "web",       #---> Instructs the SearchAPI to provide the contents of the entire webpage and/or news as part of the result.

"livecrawl_formats": "markdown", 

#---> This specifies the format of the contents of the webpage and/or new - markdown or html

}

The Search result now includes the entire contents of the Halloween candy pricing pages from Target.com. This page content has all the information that you, the analyst, need for the pricing exercise.

The new contents - markdown node contains the entire text of the webpage in a markdown format.

Step 4: Analyze the Pricing and Promotion Info

You, the research analyst, can write a simple pandas data frame to parse this content - markdown node and view it in a table format or pass the content - markdown node to a downstream LLM for further analysis.

You now have the list price, the promotion price, and the ratings for Target’s entire Halloween candy merchandise and are ready to define your price list for your halloween candy merchandise. 

Imagine this information from 10+ competitors all summarized and ready for execution.

Then, take it a step further and picture this being scaled out for all your product categories. You’ve now transformed your ability to set prices on a near-daily basis versus weekly.

Specializing in the Art of the Possible

The query in step three is a comprehensive query that can be used by all retailers–grocers, high-tech electronics, bakeries, restaurants, fashion, big-box, etc.—to monitor competitors’ ongoing pricing and promotion moves.The same approach can be used for searching for information about new SKUs, new product categories, new suppliers prior to onboarding, new grocery/fashion trends, and more.

But this is just the beginning. 

The You.com Search API can transform all aspects of a retailer’s operations—from merchandising to assortment planning to pricing to inventory management to supplier management and more—improving revenue, profitability, efficiency and reducing costs.

If you’re interested in learning more, check out the complete You.com Search API documentation. Or, if you’re looking to learn more about what’s possible with You.com, reach out at sales@you.com to discuss how we have helped retailers and other industries with our APIs.