Research the alternatives customers can actually choose and write about them honestly: source-backed competitor dossiers, market landscapes, and the comparison, versus, alternatives-to, best-for, and migration pages built on them. Use for competitive intelligence, sales preparation, positioning inputs, or any page that compares products; use truth-file for the resulting positioning decision.
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---
name: alternatives-map
description: Research the alternatives customers can actually choose and write about them honestly: source-backed competitor dossiers, market landscapes, and the comparison, versus, alternatives-to, best-for, and migration pages built on them. Use for competitive intelligence, sales preparation, positioning inputs, or any page that compares products; use truth-file for the resulting positioning decision.
license: MIT
metadata:
version: "2.0.0"
author: MTEnt
---
# Alternatives Map
A competitor's website supports claims about what it says, not about unobserved product quality. A comparison page helps a buyer choose accurately; the home product does not need to win every criterion.
If `.agents/marketing-context.md` exists, read it first; it is the truth file every skill in this hub shares, and its evidence states are constraints. Read [profile-workflow.md](references/profile-workflow.md) for research depth, evidence capture, the dossier contract, and updates. Read [comparison-pages.md](references/comparison-pages.md) when the deliverable is a page.
## Operating contract
1. Define the decision the profile or page must support, the audience, the alternative set (direct products, other approaches, services, internal workarounds, inaction), market, plan or version, and required freshness.
2. Prefer first-party product, documentation, pricing, terms, changelog, demo, and filing sources; use reviews and communities as attributed experience evidence.
3. Record source, access date, geography, plan, and uncertainty; separate claimed capability, observed capability, inferred fit, and unknown behavior.
4. Choose comparison criteria from customer decisions, not from the home product's strongest features, and represent competitor strengths and better-fit segments honestly.
5. Write the complete dossier or page, with dated caveats on drift-prone claims and a fair next step.
Do not fabricate deficiencies, imply affiliation, create trademark confusion, publish hostile claims, automate restricted collection, or build a table designed to force a predetermined winner.
## Return
Structured profiles or the finished page, the criteria and source table, implications, unknowns, and the update trigger.
