scan-market

name	scan-market
description	Sweep the web for what moved in this business's market since yesterday — competitors, prices, news, anything a customer might mention first. Use as the opening step of the morning intel workflow.

Scanning the market

The question this step answers is narrow: what changed since yesterday that this business owner would want to know before their first call? Not "what is the industry like" — what moved.

1. Know whose market you are scanning

Read shared/business-brain.md. The sections that matter here:

• Competitors worth watching — check each one by name.
• Who buys it — changes that touch the customer matter more than changes that touch the industry.
• Where leads come from today — a shift in one of those channels is front-page news for this business.

If those sections still contain <!-- fill: ... --> markers, scan the topic the request names on its own terms, and say in your notes that the brain was empty.

2. Run the sweep

Search in four lanes, in this order, and stop a lane early when it turns up nothing:

1. Competitor moves — new offers, price changes, launches, notable posts from the named competitors.
2. Price and offer shifts — anything that changes what "normal" costs in this market.
3. Market news — regulation, platform changes, tool changes that touch how this business operates.
4. Customer signals — what the target buyer is asking or complaining about publicly.

A quiet lane is a finding. "No competitor moved" is worth one line, not zero.

3. Hold the evidence bar

• Every finding carries a live URL and the date you read it.
• A claim you cannot pin to a source gets marked [unverified] or left out.
• Where two sources disagree, keep both and say they disagree.
• Prefer sources from the last week; put a date next to anything older.
• Nothing gets invented to make a thin morning look full. A thin morning is the finding.

4. Hand off

Leave your raw findings — one bullet per finding, source link attached — for the next step in the chain. The brief-writing step decides what leads; your job is that nothing in the list is unsourced.