Finding competitors on Telegram is harder than on the web, because search inside the app matches channel names rather than what is written in them. A channel called "Ivan's Notes" covering your entire market will never appear for a subject query.
Why built-in search falls short
It compares your query against titles and descriptions. So you find only the people who put a keyword in the name — which is far from everyone and rarely the best of them.
Method one: follow the links
Channels in one field reference each other constantly — reposts, cross-promotions, round-ups. Start from two or three you already know, walk their reposts, and an hour produces dozens. Slow, but precise: you get the ones the niche itself considers relevant.
Method two: keyword combinations
A parser searches by combinations rather than single words, and that changes the quality of the result. "Crypto" alone returns everything; "crypto + education" keeps the channels where both appear. See keyword research.
Method three: through people
The most underrated. The chats in your field contain the people who run channels in your field. Active participants of a professional chat are a short path to both the channels and the audience — finding active users.
What to do with the list
- Remove the dead. Some have not published in months — cleaning a database.
- Remove the inflated, especially if you plan to buy posts — spotting a fake channel.
- Split by purpose. Channels for placement, channels for commenting and channels merely to watch are three different lists.
What will be missing
Private channels and closed chats — invisible to search and to parsers alike. If the real activity in your field happens behind invitations, the market looks emptier from outside than it is. What to do with the list once built: analysing competitors.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.