design-research

design-research is a skill for Claude Code from ZachArticulateV/designer-pro-and-seo. It costs 124 tokens per session (1,803 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A competitive research process for a website and its leading competitors. It produces a report covering brand positioning, competitor scores, unmet opportunities, search keywords, and a build brief.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research a market or niche by domain, industry, location, and competitor count, with results delivered as Markdown, interactive HTML, or both.
Why use it?
It gives a project team evidence about how similar businesses present themselves and where the target site could stand apart.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the designer-pro-and-seo plugin — 41 skills, 14 agents, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to research a market or niche by domain, industry, location, and competitor count, with results delivered as Markdown, interactive HTML, or both.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add ZachArticulateV/designer-pro-and-seo
Claude Code
/plugin install designer-pro-and-seo

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install designer-pro-and-seo, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 41 skills, 14 agents, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for design-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zacharticulatev/designer-pro-and-seo/design-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 124 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,803 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00124 $0.01803
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.00901
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00361
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00180

Measured 12d ago against content hash e07abc8d9253, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/design-research/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

design-research

Family: design Status: Stable

Purpose

The research front-end of an engagement. Given a target domain and a niche, it captures the target's positioning, identifies top competitors, scores each on key dimensions, surfaces the white space no one is filling, and produces a markdown or interactive-HTML report that feeds design-system-gen, design-dimensions, blast-prompt, and the SEO skills. It is tool-aware: with the Firecrawl MCP it does deep multi-page scraping; without it, built-in web fetch/search + html-extract still produce a real competitive read.

Triggers

  • "competitive research" / "competitor analysis"
  • "research the niche" / "niche research"
  • "what are competitors doing"
  • "give me a competitive report"
  • "client research" / "engagement research"

Inputs

  • Target domain
  • Industry / vertical
  • Geographic scope (local / national / global)
  • Number of competitors (default 5)
  • Output format: markdown | interactive HTML | both

Steps

  1. Detect tooling. Check whether the Firecrawl MCP is connected:
    python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/workflow/capability_probe.py"
    
    (on Windows use py if python3 is absent; in PowerShell the variable is $env:CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT). It reports whether FIRECRAWL_API_KEY is set.
  2. Capture the target. Tier 1: Firecrawl-scrape the site for voice, services, positioning. Tier 2: WebFetch the key pages + html-extract for structure/tokens.
  3. Identify competitors. Use WebSearch on the niche + the target's core terms to assemble a competitor set (default 5); let the user confirm/adjust.
  4. Scan each competitor. Same tier path as step 2, one pass per competitor.
  5. Score each on the 18-dimension rubric in data/competitor-rubric.csv (positioning, brand-craft, content-depth, trust-signals, conversion-path, findability). Score every dimension 0–4 against its good/bad anchors and roll up the weighted composite exactly as references/design-research/competitor-rubric.md describes, so scores compare across competitors.
  6. Find the white space — walk each dimension across the whole set and flag the ones where every competitor is weak (the rubric's white_space_test column). Read the craft dimensions with the negative-space/rhythm method in references/design-research/white-space-method.md.
  7. Keyword landscape — call seo-cluster if available; otherwise a WebSearch-based intent grouping.
  8. Compose the report into the user's workspace (see Outputs).
  9. Report which tier ran and what a full Firecrawl crawl would add.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 124 lines · 124 tokens per session scan A e07abc8d9253

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository ZachArticulateV/designer-pro-and-seo (8 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 124 tokens to every session and 1,803 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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