How to find your competitors online: build three lists, not one
Business rivals, search rivals and AI answer rivals come from different places, and the names that appear on all three matter most.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··4 min read
How to find your competitors online comes down to keeping three separate lists: the companies buyers compare you with, the sites that hold the Google results you want, and the brands that AI assistants name when someone asks for a recommendation. Each list comes from a different place, and the names on them rarely match. This guide covers where to look for each one, and where a keyword-overlap lookup saves you hours.
Why one list is not enough
Most teams start with the rivals they already know from sales calls. That list misses half the field. A comparison blog that sells nothing can take more of your search clicks than your nearest product rival. A forum thread can be the page ChatGPT quotes when a buyer asks what to use.
| List | What puts a site on it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Business rivals | Buyers weigh it against you | Pricing, offers, positioning |
| Search rivals | It ranks for your keywords | Which topics and pages earn clicks |
| AI answer rivals | Assistants name or cite it | Which sources the models lean on |
Look hardest at any name that turns up on all three. That company is already winning customers you wanted.
The search list, by hand
Write 10 to 20 phrases a buyer would type. Mix product phrases ("project tracker for agencies") with problem phrases ("how to track client hours"). Search each one in a private window with the country set to your market, and paste every domain from the top ten into a sheet.
Then count. The domain that shows up most often is your strongest search rival. Leave giant sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube out of the count unless they hold first place for most of your phrases, because they rank for nearly everything.
Expect surprises: directories, marketplaces and "best tools" roundups. Keep them on the list. They compete for the same clicks even if they never compete for the same contract.
This works for a couple of dozen phrases. Past that, the counting becomes the job.
The search list, with a lookup
Competitor Finder on seogeoaeo.ai does the same count across every keyword your domain ranks for. You enter a domain and a country. It returns the 30 sites that share the most Google keywords with yours, and for each one shows:
- how many keywords you have in common, and how many it ranks for in total
- the share of its keywords that you rank for too
- estimated monthly visits and average rank
- your own keyword count and visits, for comparison
A site where at least 5% of its keywords are also yours counts as a close competitor. Large general sites get sorted apart, so Wikipedia does not crowd out the rivals that matter. A run costs 38 credits, and the price shows before it starts.
Know the limits before you rely on it. It covers a whole domain in one country and reads only Google rankings, so a rival that sells through trade shows or only through ads will not appear. Traffic figures are estimates. A young site that ranks for little may get no close competitors at all; in that case, start from a rival you already know and look at its keywords instead.
The AI answer list
Ask assistants the way a buyer would: "what is the best project tracker for a small agency", "alternatives to [your brand]". Run each prompt in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, check the Google AI Overview for the same phrase, and log every brand named and every page cited. Repeat each prompt, because answers change from one session to the next.
The cited pages deserve as much attention as the brands. A review roundup that keeps getting quoted is both a rival and a place you want to be mentioned.
The business list
Three places do most of the work:
- Ad libraries. The Google Ads Transparency Center, Meta Ad Library and LinkedIn Ad Library show who pays to reach your buyers. Search category words as well as brand names.
- Review sites. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Yelp and Google Maps group businesses by category, and their "alternatives" sections show who buyers weigh you against.
- Your customers. Ask new customers what else they tried and read your lost-deal notes. No tool gives you a shorter or more accurate list.
What to do next
Cut the combined list to three to five names. More rows rarely change a decision. Then study each one: what it ranks for, what it pays for, and where it gets cited.
If you would rather skip the spreadsheet for the search list, the full write-up of this method is on the seogeoaeo.ai blog, and the finder runs from the browser or from an AI agent. Manual searching still wins on one point: it costs nothing, and for a site with only a handful of rankings it may tell you as much as any lookup.