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2026 State of
Competitive
Intelligence
The 9TH edition is here
Read the report
Crayon · 9th Edition · The Industry's Longest-Running CI Report
Six chapters on how the best programs turn competitive intelligence into revenue, plus a 1-minute grader to benchmark your own.
Inside: 16 charts and 19 findings across six chapters.
Instant access to all six chapters, plus your personalized CI maturity grade.
The 2026 Report · 9th Edition
For nearly a decade, this report has tracked how competitive intelligence programs get built, funded, and measured. This year the headline isn't that more teams are doing CI; almost everyone is. It's how far the best programs have pulled away from the rest.
Across six chapters we map what separates the teams turning compete into revenue from the teams treating it as a reporting exercise: how they're organized, what they measure, how often they put intel in front of sellers, and how aggressively they've wired in AI. The patterns are remarkably consistent, and almost all of them are choices any team can make.
One headline finding from each chapter. The fastest way to see what changed this year. Tap any to jump in.
The big picture
Across nine editions of this report, no period has matured faster than the last five years: adoption, win rates, and proven revenue impact are all at record highs. The real story now isn't whether teams do CI; it's how wide the gap has grown between the leaders and everyone else, and what, exactly, the leaders are doing differently.
Two-thirds of teams now run a dedicated CI platform, up from roughly a third in 2022. The build-vs-buy question is tilting decisively toward buy: rather than stitch compete together from spreadsheets and scattered tools, teams are standing up purpose-built platforms (Crayon among them) that turn it into real, repeatable infrastructure.
The share of teams achieving positive revenue impact has more than doubled since 2022. As programs mature and measurement improves, the business case for compete keeps getting stronger.
49.6% saw their win rate against competitors increase over the past year, versus just 6.3% who saw it fall. Compete programs aren't just busy; they're moving the metric that matters most.
Markets are more competitive than ever
Every year of this survey, competitive pressure ticks up, and 2026 is no exception. More deals are competitive, most are now head-to-head, yet rep readiness is stuck in the middle. The opportunity isn't tracking more competitors; it's preparing reps better for the ones that matter, which starts with simply measuring how often you go head-to-head.
57.5% report that more of their deals are competitive than a year ago; only 16% say it eased. Differentiation is getting harder and the market is getting noisier.
Seven in ten teams say at least half of their sales opportunities are now competitive. Yet asked how prepared their reps are for those deals, the average score is just 6.3 out of 10, a persistent readiness gap that competitive enablement exists to close.
Nearly 8 in 10 teams actively track 30 competitors or fewer, with the largest group focused on 11–30. Depth over breadth remains the winning posture, especially for younger programs.
Get structured
World-class programs aren't complicated, but they are deliberate. A clear owner, real KPIs, a dedicated platform, and an executive sponsor each independently more than double the odds of revenue impact. Most teams are missing at least one, and an exec sponsor is the piece most often missing. If you're starting somewhere, start with KPIs, then go win that sponsor.
Marketing owns the compete function at 42% of companies, followed by strategy/exec and product. Wherever it sits, the pattern is the same: programs without a clear owner, and without a tie into sales, stall out.
KPI adoption jumped from 30% in 2022 to 60.5% today, the steepest climb of any maturity indicator this year. And as the blueprint chapter shows, measurement is the single biggest predictor of whether a program proves its value: teams that track KPIs see a rising win rate at 66%, versus 24% of those that don't.
Competitive win rate is the most-tracked metric, followed by content usage and influenced revenue. The teams that measure outcomes, not just activity, are the ones that earn budget and prove impact.
Teams with an exec sponsor are 2.5x more likely to achieve $1M+ in revenue impact and more than double strong sales adoption: 62% see their win rate climb, versus 33% without one. Yet only 56.7% have one, a number that's been essentially flat for years. It's the highest-leverage practice with the lowest adoption.
I have such enthusiastic executive committee support from my executive that he'll push through any barriers that we run into.
Get on a weekly clock
The best programs blend sources, ship a range of deliverables, and above all keep a relentless cadence. Source breadth and content mix help, but sharing weekly or faster is one of the strongest predictors of adoption and revenue in the whole survey. The move that works: pick one weekly ritual and automate it into the three places sellers already live: the CRM, Slack or Teams, and your enablement tool.
For years, the competitor’s own website was the source teams leaned on most. In 2026 it was overtaken. Group the intel teams already own: knowledge from employees, internal docs, and call recordings (46% now run a tool like Gong for compete), and it’s the most-cited source at 54%, ahead of competitor websites at 48%. Win/loss insights from buyers and sellers rank third at 36%. The competitor website is still the single most-named option, but the center of gravity has shifted to the field intel teams generate themselves.
Roughly 56% of teams share CI weekly, daily, or in real time, leaving a large group on a monthly-or-slower cadence. As the next finding shows, that gap is expensive.
Battlecards remain the backbone of compete content, but comparison content, competitor profiles, and win/loss reports are all widely produced. Win stories and win/loss reports, both newer additions, already correlate with stronger outcomes.
Teams that share weekly or faster achieve revenue impact at 79% vs. 41% for monthly-or-slower. The same gap shows up in adoption and win rate. The takeaway is blunt: frequency, not format, is what moves the needle.
Put AI to work
Using AI to create compete content is now table stakes: 80% of teams already do it. The advantage now belongs to teams putting AI to work in the sales motion: chatbots and agents that prep reps and push intel into live deals, where the biggest outcome gap in the report lives. The way in is small and specific: start one agent use case (meeting prep or deal alerts) inside your CI platform, not as generic prompts against scraped sites.
80% of teams use AI to generate sales-facing competitive content, up from 61% in 2025 and just 25% in 2024. And it's not a novelty: most of those teams now have AI generating a meaningful share of their content.
Summarizing content tops the list, but analyzing competitor data, collecting intel, and summarizing win/loss interviews are all common. AI is quietly absorbing the most time-consuming parts of the CI workflow. Getting that intel in front of reps is increasingly an agent's job. More on that next.
Half of teams now run AI agents in production or pilot, with another 14% planning to within a year. The payoff is striking: teams running agents in production or pilot achieve revenue impact at 82% vs. 42% for teams not using them, one of the widest gaps in the survey.
Among teams using agents, the most common jobs are post-call follow-up, battlecard recommendations, and meeting prep, closing the last mile by putting competitive insight into the rep's hands at the moment of the deal.
We are trying to build AI-driven systems that synthesize news, internal updates, and competitor actions into concise, actionable insights for the field — focusing on the ‘So what?’ and strategic implications rather than just relaying news.
Blueprint for success
Pull every chapter together and the same practices separate the teams driving revenue from everyone else. We mapped the dozen with the strongest pull, grouped into three clusters: your blueprint for what to build. (Associations, not proof of cause; the strongest programs tend to do all of them at once.)
Measurement and executive backing: the foundation every high-impact program is built on, and where the widest gaps open up.
Cadence beats tooling. The programs that put intel in front of sales weekly, or faster, pull away on every outcome.
Cadence moves adoption even harder than revenue: soliciting sales feedback weekly is the single biggest driver of strong CI adoption in the survey: 69% vs. 22%.
The newest divide. Teams that move AI from drafting content to acting in the sales motion (agents, chatbots, a real toolset) see the widest gaps of all.
Key takeaways
If this report leaves you with one thing, let it be this short list. You don't need a bigger budget to begin. You need to begin in the right order, because each move makes the next one pay off.
Start at the top and work your way down. You'll feel each step make the next one easier.