Pricing intelligence: how AI monitors competitor and market prices
Pricing intelligence is the practice of collecting competitor and market prices, matching them to your own products, and using the result to set or defend your prices. Competitor price monitoring is the core of it: tracking what rivals charge on their websites, in marketplaces and in the quotes your customers share. Price intelligence software automates the collection, and AI handles the hardest part, which is deciding that two differently described items are the same product. This guide covers how competitive pricing intelligence works for a distributor, a manufacturer or an auto-parts seller, the data it needs, how to start, and the legal lines.
What pricing intelligence covers
Pricing intelligence answers one question: what is the market charging for what you sell? The answer comes from several kinds of source, and each needs different handling.
| Source | What it tells you | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor websites and online catalogues | Published prices, promotions and stock status | Pack sizes, prices shown only after login, and the site’s terms of use |
| Marketplaces | What sellers charge for the same branded item | Many sellers per item, and whether shipping is included |
| Distributor and manufacturer price lists | List prices and announced increases | The discounts off list that the list does not show |
| Quotes customers share, and lost-deal notes | What a competitor offered on a real order | Partial information from a single deal |
| Input-cost indexes | Where raw material and energy prices are heading | Monthly figures by product category, not by item |
Canada’s Competition Bureau lists public prices as one of three data sources that pricing algorithms use. Its discussion paper on algorithmic pricing describes algorithms that monitor “publicly available information such as competitors’ online prices and promotional activities to inform strategic decision making.” BDC’s guide to setting prices tells smaller firms to do the same: “Learn everything you can about your competition, what they’re offering and their prices.”
Market prices include what your inputs cost. Statistics Canada’s industrial product and raw materials price indexes showed unwrought copper up 49.3% and unwrought aluminum up 27.6% in the year to August 2026. A distributor of wire or aluminum products that watches those indexes can expect competitors’ price lists to move, and can check its own costs before they do.
How competitor price monitoring is done by hand
Done by hand, competitor price monitoring depends on whoever has time. A sales rep mentions that a competitor quoted 8% lower. Someone checks five competitor websites before the annual price review and types the prices into a spreadsheet. A customer forwards a competing quote as a PDF. None of it shares an item number with your catalogue, so each comparison is a judgment about whether two products are really the same.
Units make it harder. One site sells by the each, another by the box of 100, and a third quotes per metre or per kilogram, so a comparison needs a unit conversion before it means anything. Shipping, minimum orders and volume breaks change the real price again.
What AI changes
Collecting prices on a schedule
Software can visit public product pages on a schedule, record the price, the pack size, any promotion and the stock status, and keep the history. It can also read prices from places a scraper cannot, such as a PDF price list, a supplier’s increase letter, a flyer or a screenshot in an email, using the same language and vision models that read invoices. Text extraction from images covers that step.
Collection has rules. A site can publish a robots.txt file that tells automated visitors which pages to avoid, and RFC 9309, the standard that defines it, describes rules “that crawlers are requested to honor” and states that “These rules are not a form of access authorization.” A site’s terms of use can restrict automated collection as well. Read them, honour robots.txt, and stay away from pages behind a login.
Matching products across sites
Matching is the hard part. Researchers call it entity matching, which Ralph Peeters, Aaron Steiner and Christian Bizer define as “the task of deciding whether two entity descriptions refer to the same real-world entity.” When both sellers show a Global Trade Item Number, the identifier that GS1 says a company can use “to uniquely identify all of its trade items,” matching is a lookup. When they do not, the match has to come from the brand, the manufacturer’s part number and the attributes in the description.
Language models are well suited to that step. In a study published at the EDBT 2025 conference, the same researchers found that the best large language models “require no or only a few training examples to perform comparably to” models fine-tuned on thousands of examples. A sensible setup has the software propose matches with a confidence score, accept the clear ones, and send the uncertain ones to a person, whose answers improve the next round.
Units get normalized in the same pass. The software converts each competitor’s price to your unit of measure, so a box of 100 and a single unit compare on the same basis, and it records shipping and minimum-order terms beside the price.
Here is a made-up example from an electrical distributor, with every price converted to dollars per metre. A 500-foot spool is 152.4 metres.
| Listing | Sold as | Price | Per metre | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your item: 12 AWG THHN copper, solid, black | 500 ft spool | $189.00 | $1.24 | Your reference price |
| Competitor A: THHN 12 SOL BLK CU 500′ | 500 ft spool | $179.00 | $1.17 | Same item |
| Competitor B: 12 AWG solid black THHN building wire | By the metre | $1.35 | $1.35 | Same item |
| Competitor C: 12 AWG THHN stranded, black | 2,500 ft reel | $849.00 | $1.11 | Flagged: stranded, and yours is solid |
Competitor C looks cheapest, but its wire is stranded and yours is solid, so the software sends the pair to a person instead of counting it as a match.
Monitoring and alerts
Once items are matched, monitoring is a comparison. The software tracks your price against each competitor’s for every matched item, and alerts someone when a gap passes a threshold, when a competitor runs a promotion, or when a competitor runs out of stock. A weekly summary for the pricing meeting lists the largest changes and the items where you are furthest from the market.
Brands and distributors use the same monitoring to check minimum advertised price policies, which set the lowest price a reseller may advertise. In Canada, a supplier that pushes resellers’ prices up can fall under section 76 of the Competition Act on price maintenance, so get legal advice on what such a policy may require and how it is enforced.
Turning prices into decisions
A competitor’s lower price is information to weigh. Before you cut, check your win rate and margin on that item, because if you still win most quotes, the gap may not cost you anything. In BDC’s overview of pricing strategies, Brock University marketing professor Eric Dolansky says that matching every competitor price move “leaves you vulnerable and prevents you from making optimal decisions for your business because you’re too focused on what the competition is doing.”
Price optimization covers using win rates, cost-plus pricing covers the floor that cost sets, and margin analysis covers what each item earns. Watching what competitors launch, as well as what they charge, is covered in AI market research.
Pricing intelligence at a glance
| Job | What the software does | Who decides |
|---|---|---|
| Collection | Captures public prices, promotions and stock status on a schedule, and reads price lists and quotes from documents | Pricing lead chooses competitors and sources |
| Matching | Proposes matches by GTIN, part number and attributes, with a confidence score | A person confirms uncertain matches |
| Normalizing | Converts prices to your unit of measure and records shipping and minimums | Pricing lead sets the conversion rules |
| Monitoring | Alerts on gaps, promotions and stockouts, and writes a weekly summary | Pricing lead reviews alerts |
| Decisions | Sets each gap beside your margin and win rate on that item | Owner or sales manager approves price changes |
Find out which competitor prices you can track
Tell Derik what you sell, who you compete with and where their prices are published. He will tell you what can be tracked and matched.
Start a conversationWhat data pricing intelligence needs
- Your item master. Brand, manufacturer part number, GTIN or UPC where you have it, description, attributes and unit of measure.
- A list of competitors and sources. The sites, marketplaces and price lists that matter for each product family.
- Your own price history. List prices and net prices over time, so you can see who moved first.
- Sales and quote outcomes. Which quotes you won and lost, and any competitor price a customer mentioned.
- Costs. The unit cost of each item, so a price gap can be read against margin.
Matching depends on the item master, so fill in part numbers and attributes for the items you start with. An auto-parts distributor with interchange numbers on file can match far more items automatically than one whose descriptions were typed freehand. AI for ERP covers getting those records out of the ERP.
Price intelligence software
Price intelligence software falls into a few groups. Monitoring services for retail and e-commerce track large numbers of products across sites and marketplaces. Tools for B2B and industrial sellers add price lists, quotes and documents, for prices that are not published on a website. Some companies build their own collection and matching on top of their ERP data.
Whichever you consider, ask how matches are made and checked, how units and pack sizes are handled, how often prices refresh, and how the vendor collects data and whether that collection respects each site’s terms. Ask how the service is charged, for example by number of products tracked or by quote, and check the vendor’s own pricing page.
How to start
- Pick 50 to 100 items where you compete on price and lose quotes you expected to win.
- Name three to five competitors and the public sources of their prices for those items.
- Capture prices weekly for a month, and check every proposed match by hand at first.
- Normalize units, and record shipping, minimum order and promotion terms with each price.
- Bring one report to the pricing meeting, listing the items where you are furthest above or below the market, with your margin and win rate beside each.
AI evals explains how to measure match accuracy on a sample before you rely on it, and cost of AI explains how each part of a build is charged.
Legal lines and other risks
- No agreements with competitors. Under section 45 of the Competition Act, conspiring, agreeing or arranging with a competitor to fix, maintain, increase or control prices is an indictable offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, a fine set by the court, or both. Monitoring public prices involves no contact with the competitor.
- No pooled data. The Competition Bureau says common pricing algorithms or pooled data among competitors may raise issues under the Act, so be careful with any service that combines your prices with competitors’ non-public data.
- Site rules. Follow robots.txt and each site’s terms of use, and stay away from pages behind a login.
- Match errors. A mismatched item, or a box of 100 read as a single unit, can put a comparison off by a factor of 100. Check matches before anyone acts on them.
- Racing to the bottom. A rule that always matches the lowest price can follow competitors below your own cost floor, so keep the floor from cost-plus pricing in every rule.
How ThriveAI helps
ThriveAI is an AI engineering company in Ottawa that builds private AI systems on a company’s own data, for businesses that make, move or sell physical goods. For pricing intelligence, that means collecting public competitor prices and the price lists and quotes you receive, matching them to the items in your ERP, and reporting each gap beside your cost and win rate, with a named person deciding any price change. Every answer shows where it came from.
ThriveAI’s systems read your ERP as it is, including older versions installed on your own server, and every connection only reads data. They are designed to keep each client’s data on its own server in Canada. You choose a model on that server or a hosted model under a written zero data retention agreement, and a hosted model may process requests outside Canada. Derik Lawlis, the founder, leads every project and stays close to the build. About ThriveAI covers the company.