Competitor Audits

Monitor your competitor’s compliance, customer service and operations

Serve Legal can provide independent, accurate market intelligence on your competitors, performing mystery shopping audits to their stores, delivery services and e-commerce.

Fast insight with reports shared within 48 hours of the visit

Whole-estate delivery within weeks, even across large multi-site estates

Market-leading compliance auditing provider trusted by major retailers

Any Serve Legal audit type applied to competitors

How Serve Legal can help

The Risk

In today’s competitive business landscape, staying ahead demands a deep understanding of your rivals. Failing to monitor your competitors can leave you blindsided, potentially leading to missed opportunities, revenue loss and strategic setbacks.

Ignoring the competitive environment in which your business operates in could result in lost market share, outdated strategies, and decreased customer engagement.

How Serve Legal helps

At Serve Legal, we recognise that knowledge is power and provding a radar on your competitors is a valuable tool. Our audits allow you to benchmark your own performance versus your key competitors’ compliance, empowering your business with knowledge, helping you to identify competitive opportunities for future growth.

Learn More about our Data and Analytics Offering

Data and Analytics Reporting

We don’t just run audits, we turn them into live, actionable intelligence. Our investment in data, software and automation goes far beyond industry norms, giving our clients faster insight, lower reporting costs, and a genuine competitive edge. Take a look at our reporting ecosystem, combining interactive Power BI dashboards, AI-powered data assurance and a developer-friendly REST API, helping you take control of compliance performance across your organisation.

Learn More about our Data and Analytics Offering

Our success stories

In 2025 a leading UK bookmaker ran a targeted audit programme to assess the customer experience in competitor shops in closest proximity to their key sites. The audit gave them insightful data on engagement, shop presentation, upselling and product knowledge.

The data enabled them a forensically understanding relative strengths and weaknesses relative to the competitors and Serve Legal insight allowed them to crystallise future targets and significant improvement supported by real world insight

“We use Serve Legal regularly to carry out tests on our compliance with age restricted sales. This includes tobacco and the recently introduced tobacco display ban. They deliver a reliable and efficient service within agreed deadlines and with very few data errors. They are able to swiftly provide accurate analysis of our data which helps with our training and future testing programs.”

“We have worked with Serve Legal since 2009 and they have helped us to significantly reduce our risk with age restricted sales. They have played a key role in monitoring our risk across a wide range of age restricted products. Their knowledge, speed of service and flexible data provision helps us to sharpen our training and inform our future approach to compliance.”

Frequently asked questions

What do you audit at competitor sites?

We can assess competitor compliance, customer service and operations—the same way you’d audit your own business. Each audit process can be tailored to your industry and objectives; we can customise the audit approach to suit your requirements.

Can we add extra checks without launching a separate programme?

Yes. You can add bolt-on checks (e.g., promotional compliance, retail compliance, customer experience, venue safety) so the audit stays bespoke without creating a whole new programme.

Can you cover our whole estate (and competitor sites) nationally?

Yes. Serve Legal delivers audits across the UK and Ireland, with a nationwide 16+ auditor community and the ability to audit entire estates within weeks. We now also offer international reach, covering 6 continents.

About us

In early 2006, Ed Heaver and Julian Sargeson were alcohol retailers with a problem. The local authority had decided one of their sites was consistently serving underage people.

They wanted to check their staff, measure the site performance and demonstrate to the authority they were taking the issue seriously. They couldn't find a company providing a cost-effective service, so they decided to do it themselves.

The business has since grown to become the market leading provider of compliance auditing services in the UK & Ireland, and a leading voice in the conversations around age-verification and food allergy policy.

Our Customer Experience Allergen audit has been designed in collaboration with an experienced Environmental Health Practitioner and is approved by Trading Standards.