Key Intelligence Questions: Examples and a Worksheet

Key intelligence questions (KIQs) specify what a decision-maker needs to learn before acting. The worksheet below maps 18 example questions to decisions, evidence, source pages, review cadences and owners. Use it to turn a question such as "Which plan includes single sign-on?" into a source to check and an answer your team can verify.

In competitive intelligence, KIQs sit under key intelligence topics (KITs). A topic sets the scope, such as a competitor's next release. Its questions specify what you need to establish: which features will ship, for which plans, at what price and when.

Key takeaways

• A KIQ is only useful when it carries five things with it: the decision it supports, the evidence that answers it, a source page, a review cadence and an owner.
• The vocabulary predates the vendors who use it. The US Director of Central Intelligence issued annual Key Intelligence Questions from fiscal year 1974, and Jan Herring adapted the idea for corporate CI as key intelligence topics in 1999.
• Pricing pages, plan matrices, careers listings, changelogs, app-store version histories and newsrooms provide evidence for the public-source questions in this worksheet. Questions about unpublished plans need other research.
• The worksheet below (CSV and XLSX) holds 18 worked rows across packaging changes, market entry and product releases, plus blank rows to extend.

What this guide covers

• The 1974 list
• The six core columns
• Packaging change example
• Market entry example
• Product release example
• Filling the worksheet
• Turning rows into monitors
• Five common mistakes
• Frequently asked questions

Where the KIQ vocabulary comes from

The phrase is older than the CI software category. In January 1974 the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, sent his "Key Intelligence Questions for FY 1974" to senior defence and state officials ahead of submitting the list to the National Security Council Intelligence Committee for approval. He described the questions as the primary near-term guide to national intelligence collection, analysis and production. Declassified copies sit in the CIA's FOIA reading room and in an Internet Archive scan of the FY 1974 list. The intent was plain: write down the questions leadership actually needs answered this year, then judge the intelligence community on how well it answers them.

Jan Herring's 1999 article in Competitive Intelligence Review describes a key intelligence topics process adapted from government intelligence models. It starts with interviews with decision-makers and organizes their needs around strategic decisions, early warnings and key marketplace players. Those groups can overlap: a pricing decision might need both a competitor profile and alerts about changes to its offer.

For each topic, write the key intelligence questions that will guide evidence collection. If the topic is a competitor's next launch, ask which features it has announced, which customers and plans can access them, and what remains unconfirmed. For the wider discipline and its five-step process, see our guide to what competitive intelligence is.

Six columns that make a KIQ trackable

A question is answerable when you can say, in advance, what evidence would settle it and where that evidence will appear. Analysts in open-source intelligence make the same point from the other direction. Jacob Hunter of OSINT Combine shows a vague brief ("Is there an insider threat in our organisation?") being rewritten into a question about observable indicators and patterns before any collection starts.

Applied to competitor monitoring, that gives six fields, and they are the core columns of the worksheet.

1. The decision column holds the choice your company will make differently depending on the answer. If the answer would not affect a decision, leave the question out of the current monitoring list.
2. The question column takes one sentence with one unknown in it. "What is Competitor X doing?" fails. "Has Competitor X moved single sign-on out of its enterprise tier?" passes.
3. The evidence column names the observable that answers the question: a price, a plan-matrix cell, a job title and location, a changelog entry, a version number.
4. The source column carries the public page type that publishes the evidence, plus a real example. Pricing pages, help-centre plan matrices, careers listings, release notes, API changelogs, app-store listings, status pages, marketplaces and newsrooms cover most of it.
5. The cadence column sets how often someone opens the source. Choose the interval from the decision deadline and how much delay you can accept before learning about a relevant change. The example cadences below are starting points to adjust for your own decisions.
6. The owner column takes one person, who reads the alert, judges whether it matters, and updates the answer. Write the accountable reviewer's name here and record a backup if needed.

Our competitive-intelligence guide puts the same test bluntly: "Tell me everything about Competitor X" is a bad brief, while "Should we match Competitor X's price cut in the mid-market segment?" is a useful one. The difference is that the second one has a decision attached.

Track a packaging change with key intelligence questions

The topic is Competitor X's pricing and packaging. Two decisions hang off it: whether to move your own tiers, seat pricing or feature gating in the next competitive pricing analysis, and what the sales battlecard tells reps to say in deals this week.

Check pricing and packaging across the pages that describe the offer. Compare listed prices and tier names on the pricing page with the help centre's plan matrix, any applicable usage terms and the regional pricing pages relevant to your decision. Record the billing period and currency with each observation; a change on one page does not establish the terms in every market.

The evidence column tells the owner exactly what to compare: the listed price, billing period, tier name or plan-matrix cell. Monitoring the source page tells the owner when to review that evidence. In a sample checked on September 23, 2026, 1,085 of 1,941 active Visualping monitors (56%) watching pricing and plans page URLs had recorded a page change during the previous 30 days. The sample covered 95 accounts.

When a competitor pricing page changes, compare the specific evidence named in the worksheet before updating the answer. A wording or layout edit can trigger a review while leaving the price and plan features unchanged.

Source: Visualping aggregate usage analysis, September 23, 2026. Page types were identified by /pricing or /plans in the URL path. The sample included active monitors at least 30 days old that ran during the previous 30 days, excluding internal and automatically recommended monitoring. It covers URLs users chose to monitor, so it may not reflect pricing pages generally. Multiple monitors may watch the same page. Recorded changes can include wording or layout edits; check schedules and detection settings varied.

Detect a market entry with key intelligence questions

Competitor Y's expansion into a geography or segment you serve is the topic. The decision underneath it is whether to pull a regional launch forward, change partner incentives, or brief the sales team that covers the territory.

Use careers listings, regional pricing, partner directories and event pages as leads when answering market-entry key intelligence questions. A role in a new city may support an existing team, and an added currency may serve customers remotely. Record the observation and check a second source before concluding that the competitor has entered a market.

An explicit company announcement can establish a stated launch plan or date. Compare it with the other evidence; these pages have no fixed publication order.

Use job alerts on careers pages to collect the role title, location and posting date when supplied. Record the date you first saw the role separately. A cluster of roles in one region gives the owner a lead to investigate. Look for a second source, such as a regional pricing page or partner announcement, before treating hiring activity as evidence of a confirmed market entry.

Catch a product release from the changelog

This topic covers Competitor Z's published product plans and release velocity. It feeds two decisions: what to prioritise in your own next release, and how to reposition against a feature that just shipped.

Release notes, API changelogs and app-store version histories provide dated evidence for product-release key intelligence questions. Read their availability and version qualifiers: an announcement, a beta and a release for all customers describe different stages.

Treat a public roadmap as a statement of plans that can change. Status pages provide incident and maintenance context; confirm a feature launch through release notes or another explicit product announcement.

For each competitor feature release, record the feature, version, publication date, eligible plan and rollout status where the source provides them. Keep announcement, beta availability and general availability distinct in the worksheet. Before marking a feature as shipped, check whether the release applies to the plan, region or product version named in your question.

Map each worksheet row to a page you can track

The worksheet is a plain table with ten columns. Six come from the anatomy section above, with the source page split into a page type and an example URL. The other three are a topic label, the date the example URL was last opened, and a notes field. It ships in two formats.

• Download: kiq-question-to-source-worksheet.csv (opens in any spreadsheet or text editor)
• Download: kiq-question-to-source-worksheet.xlsx (formatted, with a data-validation list on the cadence column and a blank template sheet)

Both files contain the 18 worked rows from the three examples above. Every example URL in them was opened and recorded on the date in the source_checked_on column. The owner column names Eric Do Couto as the published worksheet's maintenance owner. The recorded source checks are a dated snapshot. For your copy, assign a reviewer, choose a schedule suited to the decisions it supports and record each completed check.

How to fill it for your own competitors:

1. Start from decisions. Write down the decisions your team expects to make in its next planning cycle. Each becomes a KIT, and each names the direct or indirect competitors it covers.
2. Under each topic, write questions until you run out of decisions they would change. Cut any question that would not change a decision.
3. For each question, write the evidence as something you could point at on a screen.
4. Find the competitor's page that carries that evidence, working through the site the way you would analyse a competitor's website for anything else. If no public page carries it, mark the row "no public source" and route it to win-loss interviews or partner conversations.
5. Set the cadence from the decision deadline and the delay you can accept. For example, a pricing decision due this week may warrant a daily review. Revisit the interval when the decision date or risk changes.
6. Assign one accountable owner per row, with a backup and handoff process where needed.

Review the list against the time available to investigate and update each answer. Prioritize key intelligence questions with a decision date and a reviewer who can act on the evidence. Add rows when the team has capacity to maintain them.

Start with one completed worksheet row. Paste its source URL into Visualping, set a check schedule and start monitoring that page. Review the next detected change against the evidence field before expanding the list. Free covers five pages.

Turn each worksheet row into a monitor

A KIQ with a public source page is already a competitor tracking specification. The source URL is the page to watch. The evidence column is what to watch for. The cadence is the check frequency. The owner is the alert recipient.

When setting up a page monitor, choose the page section, check schedule and alert condition for that worksheet row.

Add each source URL as a monitor and pick a check frequency that matches the cadence column. Check options run from every 2 minutes on the top Personal tier and on Business plans, through 15 minutes, hourly, daily and weekly to monthly. A daily row gets a daily check and a weekly row a weekly one. The Free plan checks hourly at its fastest, which still covers every daily and weekly row in the worksheet.

Describe the evidence in plain language as the alert condition. A pricing row gets "Alert me when a plan price, seat limit or tier name changes". A hiring row gets "Alert me when a job is posted with a location in Germany". Include the plan, feature or region that matters to the decision. Review the detected change before updating the worksheet answer.

Review detected changes against your key intelligence questions

Each detected change includes an AI Summary and a binary IMPORTANT flag based on the alert criteria. Use them to identify what needs review, then inspect the changed evidence before updating the answer in the worksheet. The assigned owner decides whether the change affects the business decision. Our playbook for IMPORTANT alerts covers how to phrase the condition so the flag fires on the changes you care about.

Alerts go to email and webhooks on every plan, including the Free plan, which covers five pages. Business plans add native Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Sheets alert integrations, labels and user management, which is how a team splits 18 rows across three owners without losing track. The REST API is available on every plan as well, so a large worksheet can be loaded programmatically instead of row by row.

For the full catalogue of pages worth watching, with monitor counts per source type, see the 27 competitive intelligence sources guide. For a data-first look at what those monitors actually caught in the first half of 2026, see the competitor monitoring report.

Five mistakes that stop a KIQ from being answered

Start by checking whether each question supports a decision. "What is Competitor X's strategy?" has no answer that changes what anyone does on Monday. Rewrite it around the decision it hides: "Is Competitor X moving upmarket, judged by enterprise roles hired and enterprise-only features added this quarter?"

Next, check whether the team can access and capture the evidence. Visualping supports password-protected page monitoring through login Actions for supported username-and-password flows. Test access and capture with an account you are authorized to use. If the evidence is inaccessible or appears only in a private sales conversation, keep the row and route it to an interview or win-loss research.

Cadence set by habit is the third issue. A change between scheduled reviews stays unexamined until the next check. Choose the interval from the decision deadline and the delay your team can accept, then revise it when those constraints change.

Volume is the fourth. Prioritize the questions whose decisions have dates, and keep the monitored list within the team's review capacity.

Last, an owner column filled in with a department. "Product marketing" is a department. One person reads the alert, and the worksheet should say who that is.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a key intelligence topic and a key intelligence question?

A key intelligence topic (KIT) is the area of the competitive environment that matters to a decision, such as a rival's pricing or a rival's expansion into a region. A key intelligence question (KIQ) is a specific, answerable question under that topic, such as "Did the rival's enterprise tier price change this month?" Herring's 1999 KIT process defines the topics through interviews with decision-makers; the questions are what analysts then collect against.

How many key intelligence questions should a team track?

Start with the questions attached to decisions in the current planning cycle. Assign an owner to each, estimate the work needed to evaluate new evidence and limit the list to what the team can keep current. Increase the count when review capacity and decision needs justify it.

How often should key intelligence questions be reviewed?

Check each row's source at the interval chosen for its decision deadline and acceptable delay. For example, a pricing decision due this week may warrant a daily review. Review the full list at the start of each planning cycle: drop questions whose decisions have passed, add questions for the next cycle, and re-verify that each source URL still exists.

Who should own a key intelligence question?

One named person, written into the owner column. In a product marketing team that is usually whoever briefs sales on the competitor the question covers, because they read the alert and answer the follow-up anyway. The decision-maker who asked for the answer stays in the interview seat: they say what they need, and the owner keeps the row current.

Are key intelligence questions the same as KPIs?

No. A KPI measures your own performance against a target. A KIQ asks what is true about the outside world, mostly about competitors, customers and regulators, before you make a decision. The two meet in the decision column of the worksheet: a KIQ's answer often changes which KPI you chase.