Competitor research for a founder: one afternoon, no subscription

You compete for customers with three companies. You compete for the first page with fifteen sites, and most of them do not sell anything like your product.

• Review sites and directories, which rank for "best X" and "X alternatives" in almost every category.
• Big publications and content sites that wrote the explainer once and never lost it.
• Forums and communities: threads that answer the question in one sentence.
• Documentation of adjacent tools, which ranks for the task, not the product.
• Your actual competitors, usually on their own brand queries and their comparison pages.

1. 1

   Write down ten real queries

   The ones your buyers type: the category, "best X", "X alternatives", the two or three jobs your product does, and one problem query.

2. 2

   Search each in an incognito window, in your main country

   Personalisation and location change results, so a clean window and the right country matter more than any tool.

3. 3

   Write down every domain in the top ten

   One column per query. Ten queries, a hundred rows, twenty minutes.

4. 4

   Count the repeats

   The domains appearing on four or more of your queries are your search rivals. Usually there are three to six.

5. 5

   Note the features

   Which queries show an AI Overview, People also ask, videos or a shopping row. Those take clicks whatever your position.

If your own site already ranks on some of these, open the Performance report and read the queries where you appear beyond position ten. Those are the fights you are already in.

The sitemap is the single highest-value file. It is their content plan, published, and it shows which families they invested in and which they abandoned by the dates in the lastmod values.

The rule: copy the shape of what works, never the text. A page that repeats what the top ten already say has nothing to earn, and Google's guidance asks what a page offers beyond the obvious.

Research that does not end in a decision was entertainment. Write this page, keep it in the repository, and read it when you plan a quarter.

1. Our search rivals: three to six domains, with what kind of site each is.
2. The ten queries, with who holds the top three and whether a feature sits above them.
3. The families they hold that we do not: comparisons, alternatives, job guides, tools.
4. The five pages we will write first, each with its query and the intent from the results page.
5. The ten sites that link to two rivals and not to us.
6. What we will not chase, and why.

The free method gives you the decisions. A suite gives you speed and coverage, which matter once you are choosing between forty pages rather than five.

• Every query a rival ranks on, instead of the ten you sampled.
• The gap between two sites computed for you, rather than read off a sitemap.
• Volume and difficulty estimates on hundreds of terms at once.
• A backlink index deeper than the free tiers, with the pages that link and the anchors used.
• Rank tracking over time, which no free tool gives for rivals.

None of it changes what to do on the first five pages. Buy it when the bottleneck is choosing, not when the bottleneck is writing.

• Every quarter, as a twenty-minute recheck of the ten queries: who moved, who appeared, which features are new.
• After a core update, because the mix of sites on a results page can change without anything on your site changing.
• When you add a product or a category, since the rivals for the new one are usually different people.
• When a page of yours stalls at positions five to fifteen: read the four pages above it, specifically, and write down what they have that you do not.