Competitive intelligence
How to monitor competitors on PR TIMES (summary edition)
PR TIMES has a free per-company RSS feed. Find the company ID, read the feed, sort items with Claude, then read the release. What it withholds, and the terms.
PR TIMES, the Japanese press release service, publishes a free RSS feed for every company page. Find the competitor's company ID, open its feed, paste the new items into Claude to sort them, then read the release itself before you log anything. This is the short English edition; the Japanese edition carries the full walkthrough, the prompt and the terms reading.
What a release does and does not say
Japanese SaaS companies announce funding, partnerships, features, customer counts and price changes on PR TIMES. Its operator reported more than 129,000 issuing organisations and 3 million releases in a release dated 2026-09-16 (self-reported). A release carries only what the company chose to announce, and it can announce a change while withholding the figure. A price revision notice of 2026-03-02 by ユニリタ states a uniform revision effective from June 2026 contracts and refers readers to a sales representative for the new prices. A funding release of 2026-04-28 by パトスロゴス states the round (3.1 billion yen), the cumulative total (6.8 billion yen) and a customer count. Log the fact a release states; write "not stated" for anything it does not.
The routine
Find the company page and its ID
Search the company on prtimes.jp or click its name on a release. The page URL on prtimes.jp ends in
company_id/COMPANY_ID. Confirm the name, head office and website in the profile; similar names exist. Note the competitors that do not use PR TIMES.Open the feed
https://prtimes.jp/companyrdf.php?company_id=COMPANY_IDreturns XML (checked 2026-10-07). Items carry title, link, summary and date, not the body. The site-wide feedhttps://prtimes.jp/index.rdfcarries the most recent releases from across the site (200 items when we checked on 2026-10-12) with no keyword filter; we found no keyword or category feed.Sort with Claude, then read the original
Paste the new items and ask for one type per release (funding, partnership, feature, pricing, customer, hiring, other), one fact in one sentence with its URL, and "not stated" for any number absent from the text. Open every pricing, funding and partnership release and confirm the fact in the body.
Log one line per release
Date, URL, type, the one fact, who needs to know. Leave out any row you cannot give a URL.
What PR TIMES does not show
It does not show competitors that do not use it, price changes nobody announced, or the body text the feed omits. For listed competitors, TDnet publishes mandatory disclosures and keeps them free to read for 31 days including the disclosure date (JPX, checked 2026-10-07), so check it weekly.
When the routine stops holding
Three to five competitors fit a weekly manual round. What fails is keeping the ID list correct and opening every feed every morning during a launch. Steve's site (checked 2026-10-07) says Steve sends competitor news summaries to the channels you choose every morning, allows up to 25 custom news sources per project refreshed daily, and shows source links on card rows, with updates waiting for your review. Slack delivery is daily or weekly. The site does not list PR TIMES as a source, so that part of the routine stays yours. If collection and the morning delivery are the parts you cannot keep up with, see Steve competitive intelligence.
Frequently asked
Does PR TIMES have an RSS feed?
Yes. Each company has one at `https://prtimes.jp/companyrdf.php?company_id=COMPANY_ID`, and `https://prtimes.jp/index.rdf` carries the most recent releases from across the site (200 items when we checked on 2026-10-12). We found no keyword or category feed, which is not proof there is none.
How do I find a competitor's company ID on PR TIMES?
Search the company name on prtimes.jp, or click the company name at the top of one of its releases. The number after `company_id/` in the company page URL is the ID. Check the name, head office and website in the company profile, since similar names exist.
Is automated reading of the PR TIMES feed allowed?
Unknown. The terms (last updated 2024-09-20) say nothing about RSS, bots or crawlers, and they prohibit unpermitted commercial use and heavy traffic to the servers. Ask PR TIMES and your legal team before polling the feed with a program.
Does Steve monitor PR TIMES?
The site does not say so. It says Steve sends competitor news summaries every morning and allows up to 25 custom news sources per project, refreshed daily. PR TIMES is not named (checked 2026-10-07).
Keep reading
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- October 7, 2026Competitor research for a US SaaS entering Japan: a 90-day planA 90-day plan to map Japanese competitors from public sources: registers, EDINET and TDnet filings, PR TIMES, review sites, and the rules for a comparison.
- September 14, 2026Filter noisy competitor alerts by scoring each one on four dimensionsScore every competitor alert on novelty, buyer impact, confidence and required response, run the rubric with Claude, and check the top items before you act.
- September 14, 2026A decision-ready competitor digest gives every change an implication, an unknown and an ownerTurn verified competitor changes into one short weekly update. Each line states the fact, what it implies, what is unconfirmed and who acts next.
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