008 — Use case
Competition, Not a Shrinking Market — the Distinction That Changes the Response
A software-training company needed to know whether its decline meant competitors were taking share or the whole market was contracting. Combining SEMrush with Auction Insights, AOS drew the distinction cleanly — the drop is competition-driven, not market-driven — and backed it with a head-to-head competitor table, fast and cheap.
01 Ground
A software-development training company was losing ground and faced the question that determines the entire response: is demand falling, or is someone taking our share of it? These look identical from inside a single account — both show up as declining volume — but they call for opposite reactions. A shrinking market says cut, diversify, or wait it out. A competitor taking share says fight, and tells you exactly who to fight.
Answering it requires looking outside your own four walls. You can't tell a contracting market from a losing auction by staring at your own spend and conversions; you need the market-level demand signal and the head-to-head auction picture together. Get the read wrong and you either retreat from a market that's still there for the taking, or you double down into a category that's genuinely drying up.
- Verdict: the drop is competition-driven, not market-driven — a competitor is taking share, demand is not collapsing Semrush 88% confident
- Conclusion backed by a head-to-head competitor table from SEMrush plus Google Ads Auction Insights Google Ads 88% confident
- Market demand and competitor share read together so the two explanations could be told apart Semrush 85% confident
- Run cost ~$0.52, completed in ~3.4 minutes AOS run 95% confident
02 Decide
AOS pulled the two signals that actually settle the question — SEMrush for the market and competitive footprint, Auction Insights for the head-to-head paid picture — and read them together. The verdict was unambiguous: the decline was competition-driven, not a market contraction. Someone was taking share; the demand was still there.
It backed that call with a head-to-head competitor table rather than asserting it, so the operator could see who was gaining and where. That is the distinction that changes the response: instead of a defensive 'the market is shrinking, manage the decline,' the team got an offensive read — the demand exists, a named rival is capturing it, and the job is to win it back.
03 Deploy
A competitive-intelligence read that distinguishes competition-driven decline from market contraction, with a head-to-head competitor table from SEMrush and Auction Insights as the evidence.
The output answers the strategic fork directly — fight, don't retreat — and names the rival to fight, rather than leaving the team to guess whether the category itself is the problem.