Boost Your Strategy: how to find competitors of a website

To find competitors of a website, combine five methods: search Google for your core keywords and note who ranks, run a keyword overlap report (Ahrefs Competing Domains or Semrush Organic Competitors), check audience overlap in a tool like Similarweb, use backlink analysis to find affiliate publishers and review sites, and see which brands AI answer engines recommend. Then score every domain by keyword overlap, audience overlap, authority and traffic, and sort them into tiers.

The catch is that your real competitor list is wider than the companies selling what you sell. In search, you compete with anyone who wins your audience's attention for a query. That includes direct rivals, indirect problem-solvers, publishers, affiliates and forums.

Thinking Beyond Your Direct Business Rivals

When an SEO team is asked to do competitor analysis, the first list is almost always just direct business competitors. That's a start, but the picture is incomplete.

Look at it from your customer's side. When they have a question or a problem, they go to Google first. The sites on that first page are your real competitors for that query: blogs, review sites, forums and publishers. They are winning the clicks and attention you want.

This change in thinking is the basis of modern competitive intelligence for SEO. Instead of asking only who sells a similar product, ask who owns the conversation with your audience online.

It helps to split the competitive landscape into three tiers. Together they show everyone you're really up against.

Direct Competitors

These are the obvious ones: businesses that offer a nearly identical product or service to the same customers. If you sell project management software, other project management software companies are your direct competitors, such as Asana and Trello. It's Coke vs. Pepsi.

Indirect Competitors

Indirect competitors solve the same core problem for your customer with a different solution.

Say you sell high-end coffee beans online. An indirect competitor isn't another coffee bean website. It's the local artisan coffee shop, a Nespresso pod subscription or a premium energy drink brand. They all meet the customer's need for a "morning energy boost and flavor experience."

SERP Competitors

This is the category most teams miss. SERP competitors are all the domains that rank for your target keywords. They compete with you for space on the search engine results page (SERP), and they might not sell anything at all.

For a B2B SaaS company, SERP competitors could be:

• Software review platforms like G2 or Capterra
• Major publications like Forbes or TechCrunch
• Niche content creators on YouTube
• Even a Wikipedia page explaining a core concept

Your most dangerous competitor isn't always the one with a similar product. It's the one who answers your customer's question first on the search results page.

Mapping all three types gives you a realistic view of the market. With that view, you can stop reacting only to other products and plan how to win your audience's attention at every touchpoint.

Here's a quick summary before we get into the methods for finding each type.

Now let's get into the step-by-step workflows for finding each one.

Using Google Search to Manually Uncover Competitors

Before you pay for competitor analysis tools, start with Google, which is free and already open in another tab. I always begin here. Searching by hand shows you the real search results in a way no data table can.

A few search commands let you see results the way a searcher does. This first pass shows you who actually appears when a potential customer starts looking for answers.

Mastering Advanced Search Operators

Google's advanced search operators are short commands you add to a query to filter out the noise. A few of them are especially useful for finding competitors.

Say you run a B2B SaaS startup called "SyncUp.app" that sells project management software. Here's how you'd use them:

• Alternatives and comparison queries (instead of related:): Older guides tell you to type related:yourdomain.com, but Google deprecated the related: operator in 2023 and it no longer returns reliable results. Search for comparisons instead: syncup alternatives, syncup vs, or asana alternatives for the best-known player in your category. Google's autocomplete and the "People also search for" box will quickly show the direct competitors searchers compare you with, such as Asana, Trello and Monday.com.

• The site: and -site: Operators: These include or exclude a specific website from your search. Use them to see who else dominates the conversation around your core topics.

• The intitle: and inurl: Operators: Use these to find competitor landing pages and comparison pages. For example, intitle:"project management" inurl:pricing lists pricing pages, and inurl:vs "project management software" surfaces head-to-head comparison pages.

For instance, you could search for best project management software -site:syncup.app. This removes your own site from the results and shows you every review site, blog and competitor ranking for that high-intent keyword.

Pro Tip: Don't just search for your main keyword. Search for the problems your customers face. A query like "how to manage remote team tasks" -site:syncup.app will turn up a different set of SERP competitors, often blogs and content publishers that your direct rivals may be ignoring.

Combining Operators with Keyword Modifiers

Combine these operators with different keyword modifiers to get past the obvious rivals. This is how you find the indirect and SERP competitors who are taking your audience's attention.

Take a niche ecommerce store that sells sustainable, vegan-friendly hiking boots. A search for "vegan hiking boots" shows the direct competition, but not the wider market around it. For a deeper look, see our guide on how tools like Semrush find similar sites, which automates many of these discovery steps.

Here are a few modified searches that store owner could use to broaden their list:

• "best sustainable outdoor gear" review
• "alternatives to leather hiking boots"
• "eco-friendly camping" blog

Each query shows a different part of your competitive landscape: affiliate marketers, influential content creators and niche community forums, all of which reach your ideal customers. Reviewing these SERPs by hand gives you quick qualitative insight and a varied list of competitors to analyze later. Search from an incognito window or a location-neutral SERP checker so personalization doesn't skew what you see.

Analyzing Keyword Overlap to Find Your SERP Rivals

Manual Google searches give you a feel for who you're up against, but they don't scale. To understand the competitive field properly, you need data instead of assumptions. Data shows exactly who you compete with across the search engine results page (SERP).

The most direct way to identify your SERP rivals is to analyze keyword overlap, which means finding which other websites rank for the same keywords you do. The more keywords you share with a site, the more directly it competes with you for organic visibility.

Using SEO Tools for Instant Insights

You need an SEO platform for this, because doing it manually isn't practical. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz have built-in reports that make it fast.

In Ahrefs, enter your domain in Site Explorer and open the "Organic competitors" report (previously called "Competing Domains"). Semrush has a nearly identical "Competitors" tab inside Organic Research.

These reports are built from ranking data. They list the websites that rank for a high share of the same keywords as your site. For each one, you get the percentage of keyword overlap, the number of shared keywords and an estimate of the rival's organic traffic.

In my experience, this is often the most surprising part of competitor analysis. Your biggest online rivals often aren't the companies named in your business plan. More often, they're large content hubs, specialized niche blogs or product review aggregators.

Interpreting the Keyword Overlap Data

Once you have the list, separate the real threats from the background noise. A high keyword overlap (around 40% or more) on a site with significant traffic marks a primary SERP competitor. Watch these closely.

Don't dismiss sites with lower overlap, though. They may be indirect competitors, or newer sites starting to target a specific part of your audience.

This data is more than a list of domains. It's a roadmap for your content strategy, showing who is winning visibility for the topics your customers care about most.

This method regularly turns up competitors you didn't know you had. Look beyond the overlap percentage at which keywords overlap. A small set of high-volume, high-intent terms usually drives most of a site's organic traffic. If a competitor owns those terms, it matters more than one sharing hundreds of low-volume long-tail phrases with you.

Moving from Overlap to Opportunity

Identifying keyword overlap is only the first step. The next is a keyword gap analysis, which finds valuable keywords your competitors rank for that you aren't targeting yet.

Say you're a new SaaS company. You might find that your main rival, an established player, ranks for hundreds of high-intent keywords you've never considered. These gaps are your immediate content opportunities. If you create better content for those terms, you can start taking traffic and authority from them. For more, see our guide on keyword research strategies.

Keyword overlap analysis is essential for finding a website's true competitors. It bases your strategy on real SERP data, so you spend time and money on the visibility that actually matters.

Using Traffic Overlap to Identify Audience Competitors

Keyword analysis shows who you're up against in the search results. Audience analysis asks a different question: where do your visitors go when they aren't on your site? The answer often reveals a new and sometimes surprising group of competitors.

This is traffic overlap analysis: finding other websites that share a large part of your audience. If the same people visit your site and another one, that site competes for their time and loyalty, even if it doesn't sell what you sell.

Uncovering Shared Visitor Pools

You can't find shared audiences by hand. You need a platform with large amounts of user data, such as Similarweb or the audience overlap reports in Semrush (Traffic Analytics). Enter your domain and the tool shows which other sites your visitors frequent.

Say you run a D2C brand selling high-end running shoes. A standard keyword analysis will point you to other shoe brands, as you'd expect. A traffic overlap analysis might show something quite different. You could find that 30% of your audience also regularly visits a popular marathon training blog, a nutrition supplement store and a well-known GPS watch brand's site.

These aren't your direct product rivals, but they are audience competitors. They've already won the attention of your ideal customer.

Audience overlap analysis does more than find competitors. It maps the other products, services and content your customers use, which tells you a lot about what matters to them.

This data is far from a vanity metric. For large brands in the same category, such as Nike and Adidas, traffic overlap tools routinely surface shared audiences in the millions of unique visitors per month. Treat these figures as directional, since they're panel-based estimates, but the relative ranking of overlapping sites is usually reliable. You can see a good breakdown of how to interpret competitor traffic data on Semrush's blog.

Turning Audience Insights into Strategy

Your list of audience competitors is effectively a profile of your audience's interests and online habits, and you can use it in several ways.

Here are a few to start with:

• Content Partnerships: That popular marathon blog your audience loves is a strong candidate for a co-marketing campaign or a guest post exchange.
• New Product Ideas: If a large share of your audience also buys from a specific apparel site, that may be a sign to expand your own product line.
• Smarter Ad Targeting: Build custom ad audiences based on visitors to these overlapping sites. Your message then reaches relevant users who already show interest in your space.

Knowing where your audience spends time online makes your competitive analysis much stronger and takes you beyond watching rankings. To keep the visibility you earn, you also need a solid tracking process, covered in our guide to setting up competitor rank tracking. Thinking about your customer's whole journey this way opens up new ways to win their attention.

Using Backlink Analysis to Find Affiliate Publishers and Landing Pages

Backlinks reveal a group of competitors and partners that keyword reports often miss: the affiliate publishers, review sites and resource pages sending traffic to your rivals. If a publisher links to three of your competitors but not to you, it's both a competitor for attention and an outreach opportunity.

Finding Competitor Affiliate Publishers

1. Run a link intersect report. In Ahrefs (Link Intersect) or Semrush (Backlink Gap), enter your top 3–5 competitors and your own domain. Filter for sites linking to at least two competitors but not to you.
2. Filter for commercial intent. Narrow the referring pages to URLs or titles containing best, review, vs, top or alternatives. These are usually affiliate roundups and comparison posts.
3. Look for affiliate parameters. Links containing ?ref=, ?via=, /go/ or a partner network domain (Impact, PartnerStack, ShareASale) confirm a paid affiliate relationship.
4. Confirm with Google. Search "competitor name" "affiliate disclosure" or "best [your category]" "we may earn a commission" to find publishers the tools missed.

Finding Competitor Landing Pages and URLs

To see which competitor URLs actually drive results, open the "Top pages" report for each competitor in your SEO tool and sort by estimated traffic. Then check "Best by links" to find their most-linked assets, such as calculators, studies and templates. Together, these show which landing pages win them both rankings and links. For paid landing pages, the Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta Ad Library show the ads a competitor is running and where they send traffic.

Checking Which Competitors AI Search Recommends

A growing share of research now starts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. The brands these engines cite for a category prompt are competitors too, and they don't always match the organic top ten.

Run 10–20 prompts your buyers would realistically use, such as "best project management tool for remote agencies" or "Asana alternatives for small teams." Record every brand and source each engine mentions. Repeat the prompts across engines and over several weeks, because AI answers vary between runs. Sight AI's AI visibility tracking automates this, monitoring which competitors appear for your prompts and how often your brand is cited next to them.

Turning Your Competitor List Into a Strategy

Once you've done this research, you'll likely have a long spreadsheet of domains and no obvious place to start. The next job is turning that raw data into a focused strategy.

Knowing who's out there isn't enough. You need to work out which sites are a genuine threat and which are background noise, and then decide what to do about each one.

Validating and Prioritizing Your Competitors

The most practical way I've found to handle a long competitor list is a simple tiering system. It lets you spend time and resources according to the actual threat each competitor poses.

You'll sort each website into one of three buckets:

• Tier 1 (Primary Competitors): Your direct rivals, the ones you constantly compete with for the top spot. They have high keyword overlap, a large shared audience and often similar domain authority. Watch everything they do.
• Tier 2 (Secondary Competitors): Strong SERP competitors and indirect business rivals. They have moderate keyword overlap or a noticeable audience share, but they don't compete with you on every front.
• Tier 3 (Tertiary or Emerging Competitors): Newer or niche players with low but growing overlap. Keep an eye on them, but they don't need day-to-day attention.

Prioritization is what turns a pile of data into usable insight. Without it, you'll waste effort on rivals that don't matter.

A core metric for validating these tiers is audience overlap.

If the same people visit both your site and another one, you're competing for their attention. That makes the other site a valid competitor to track.

Building Your Competitor Prioritization Matrix

Next, build a scoring matrix. It replaces gut feelings about who your competitors might be with an objective, data-backed list. Create a simple spreadsheet and add the data you've gathered: keyword overlap, audience overlap, domain authority, and estimated traffic.

Here is a simple template to get you started.

Competitor Prioritization Matrix

Use this matrix to rank competitors on key metrics and sort them into tiers for planning.

Scoring every competitor gives you a clear, tiered list you can act on.

Everything that follows builds on this list. Once your tiers are set, a thorough SEO competitor analysis guide can help you break down their strategies and find opportunities.

With clear tiers, you can build a specific plan for each. For Tier 1 competitors, set up detailed rank tracking with one of the best SERP tracking tools and review their content weekly. For Tier 2, a monthly check-in may be enough. We cover this in more depth in our guide to SEO competitor reports. A structured approach keeps your team focused where it will have the most impact.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I analyze my competitors?

Do a full deep-dive every quarter. That's often enough to catch strategic shifts, such as a new content push or repositioning, without chasing daily noise. Check the SERPs for your most valuable high-intent keywords weekly to spot new entrants early. In fast-moving markets like e-commerce or SaaS, move the full review to a monthly cycle.

How do I find out a competitor website's target audience?

Start with Similarweb or Semrush Traffic Analytics, which estimate a site's demographics, geography, interests and the other sites its visitors use. Then check qualitative signals: who their case studies and testimonials feature, how their pricing tiers are named, and which audiences their ads target in the Meta Ad Library. Finally, read the language used in their top-traffic pages. The problems they address show who they're writing for.

How do I find competitors' affiliate publishers?

Run a link intersect or backlink gap report on your top competitors. Filter for referring pages with "best," "review" or "vs" in the URL, and look for affiliate parameters like ?ref=. The full four-step process is in the backlink analysis section above.

Can I find competitor websites without paid tools?

Yes, though it takes more manual work. Use Google with "your topic" -site:yourdomain.com and "alternatives" or "vs" queries, check Google Keyword Planner for related terms and see who ranks for them, and search Reddit and Quora to see which brands people recommend. For data at scale, look at free tiers of SEO platforms, compared in our roundup of free Ahrefs alternatives.

My competitor has way more traffic. What should I do?

Don't try to match their raw volume. Use keyword gap analysis to find their blind spots: long-tail terms they ignore and niche audiences they serve poorly. Smaller sites regularly beat giants by publishing deeper, more specific content on topics the bigger player covers only briefly. Your goal isn't to be bigger than them. It's to be the better answer for a specific audience or topic they've overlooked.

Ready to stop guessing and start winning? Sight AI automatically tracks how your brand and competitors are mentioned across AI models and search engines. Turn visibility insights into high-ranking content and actionable growth strategies. Learn how you can automate your competitive intelligence at https://www.trysight.ai.