Fentner Business Spotlight

What Is Competitive Intelligence? CompetitorBase's 2026 Numbers

A short definition of competitive intelligence, then the figures worth knowing this year, taken from CompetitorBase's two September 2026 statistics pages. Survey numbers are credited to their publishers; scan numbers come from 310 domains CompetitorBase checked between 13 August and 25 September 2026.

  • 68% of deals involve a head-to-head competitor (Crayon, 2025)
  • Average B2B software shortlist: 2.6 products (TrustRadius)
  • Lost-deal reasons from buyer and seller agree 15% of the time (Clozd)
  • 166 of 310 scanned companies had live ads; 58 ran branded cold email domains (CompetitorBase scans)
  • 80% of CI teams use AI for sales content (Crayon, 2026)

Our ranking of monitoring tools: Fentner's 2026 competitor monitoring comparison

Sources and full lists: CompetitorBase competitive intelligence statistics

What is Fentner Business Spotlight?

Fentner Business Spotlight is the audio edition of the firm's published research. Fentner Group assesses brands, products, and market structure in digital markets from evidence any reader can obtain, under criteria fixed before the review begins. Each episode covers one report and links to the published text.