How to find your competitors online
·4 min read
To find competitors online, search your main keywords and note who ranks, ask ChatGPT and Perplexity to recommend a business like yours, and look up who advertises in Google's and Meta's ad libraries. Each method finds a different list. Business competitors sell what you sell, search competitors rank for your keywords, and AI answer competitors get named when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation.
Treat them as three lists. The site taking most of your searches may sell nothing at all.
Who are my competitors? The three kinds
"Who are my competitors" has three answers, and you need all of them before you decide what to copy or where to spend.
| Kind | Who they are | Where you find them | What you learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business | Companies a buyer compares you with | Sales calls, review sites, ad libraries | Pricing, positioning, offers |
| Search | Sites ranking for your keywords | Google results, keyword overlap data | Topics and pages that win clicks |
| AI answer | Brands and pages AI assistants name or cite | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews | Which sources the models trust |
The overlap is where to look hardest. A company that shows up on all three lists is the one taking your customers today.
How to find search competitors in Google
Your search competitors are the domains that keep appearing on page one for the queries you want.
- Write down 10 to 20 keywords a buyer would type, mixing product terms ("invoice software for contractors") with problem terms ("how to send an invoice").
- Search each one in a private window, set to the country you sell in.
- Record every domain in the top 10 in a sheet, one row per domain.
- Count how often each domain appears. Sort by count.
Ignore Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit and other giant sites in that count unless they hold the top spot for most of your terms. They rank for nearly everything, so sharing a keyword with them tells you little.
Expect publishers, directories and marketplaces near the top. A "best X tools" listicle that ranks for ten of your keywords is a search competitor even though it sells nothing.
Manual checks stop scaling past a few dozen keywords. Keyword overlap data does the same count across every keyword your domain ranks for. Once you have the list, see which keywords bring each competitor traffic and find the ones they rank for and you don't.
One shortcut you may remember is gone. Google retired the related: search operator in 2023, which its Search Liaison confirmed. "Sites like X" lookups now come from third-party tools, and their similarity is usually based on shared audiences or links, not shared searches. Use them for ideas, then confirm each site in the results yourself.
How to find AI answer competitors
AI answer competitors are the brands an assistant names when a buyer asks for a recommendation. Ask the way a customer would.
What's the best invoicing software for a small construction company?
Which accounting tools work well for freelancers in the UK?
Alternatives to [your brand]Run each prompt in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and check Google's AI Overview for the same query. Write down every brand named and every page cited. Run each prompt more than once, because answers vary between sessions, and one run is not a measurement.
The cited pages matter as much as the brand names. When an answer quotes a review roundup or a forum thread, that page is an AI competitor too, and also a place to get mentioned. Find which pages AI answers cite for your topic when you want this across many questions at once.
How to find business competitors
Business competitors are easiest to find where they spend money and where buyers compare.
Ad libraries. Anyone advertising on your terms is competing for the same buyer. The Google Ads Transparency Center shows ads by advertiser, and the Meta Ad Library and LinkedIn Ad Library show who runs social ads. Search category words, not only brand names.
Review and comparison sites. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Yelp and Google Maps group businesses by category. The "compare with" and "alternatives" sections list who buyers weigh you against.
Your own customers. Ask new customers what else they looked at. Read lost-deal notes. This list is short and more accurate than any tool.
Then pick three to five names and build a competitor analysis on them. More rows rarely change a decision.
Find competitors that share your Google keywords
Competitor Finder handles the search list. Enter your domain and choose a country, and it pulls the 30 sites that share the most Google keywords with yours (your own domain counts as one of them). For each site it shows how many keywords you share, how many it ranks for in total, estimated monthly visits and average rank, next to your own keyword count and visits.
It sorts the sites by overlap, the share of a site's keywords that you rank for too. At 5% or more the site counts as a close competitor. Below 0.5% it is a large general site that ranks for everything. Visits and keyword counts are estimates from our keyword data.
It looks at the whole domain in one country and works only from Google rankings, so it will not find rivals that compete offline or only through ads. A small site with few rankings may get no close competitors at all, and the report says so. A run costs 38 credits.