SurfSense: Give Your AI Agents Competitive Intelligence

SurfSense is the open-source competitive intelligence platform for AI agents. Your agents monitor competitors, track rankings, and listen to your market with live data from Reddit, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Search, and the open web, through one REST API or MCP server. Scheduled and event-triggered agents turn what they find into briefs and alerts, and a built-in knowledge base keeps every finding searchable with citations.

[!NOTE] 📢 A note for our NotebookLM-alternative users

For the past couple of months we built SurfSense as the best general research agent for your own knowledge, and that chapter earned us a community we are genuinely proud of. Agentic tools like Claude, OpenCode, Hermes, and OpenClaw have now proven that agents are the future, and general research is becoming something every capable agent does out of the box. What agents still lack is live market data and the workflows around it, so that is where we are pointing all of our energy: becoming the definitive open-source competitive intelligence agent platform.

Nothing you rely on is going away. Your knowledge base, chat with citations, reports, podcasts, presentations, automations, and collaborative chats all keep working, and self-hosting stays free and open source. Read the full announcement on our changelog.

Table of contents

• Why agents need SurfSense
• What can you do with SurfSense?
• Live data connectors
• Quick start
• Everything else in the box
• SurfSense vs Google NotebookLM
• Roadmap
• Contribute

Why agents need SurfSense

Ask any capable agent "what are competitors charging this week?" or "what is Reddit saying about us since the launch?" and it has nowhere trustworthy to look. Official platform APIs are rate-limited, priced for enterprises, or missing entirely, and scraping plumbing is brittle. SurfSense closes that gap:

• Platform-native connectors, each a typed REST endpoint returning structured JSON. No rate-limit roulette, no HTML parsing.
• An MCP server that exposes every connector as a native tool (surfsense_reddit_scrape, surfsense_google_search, and more) to Claude, Cursor, or any agent framework.
• An agent harness, not just raw data: retries, structured output, and credit metering are built in, so agents go from a question to a brief without you building the plumbing.
• Open source and self-hostable, so your competitive research stays on your own infrastructure.

What can you do with SurfSense?

Every use case below is a real task the SurfSense agent runs end-to-end today, in one prompt or on a schedule.

Multi-connector workflows

Chain several connectors in a single agent run and get one cited brief back.