The best way to find competitors, ranked by how much it hides from you

What is the best way to find competitors? Every method has its own blind spot, so the answer is to combine a few and know what each one hides from you. Below are the usual methods, ranked from most useful to least, each with a verdict short enough to fit in a post.

1. Ask your customers

Verdict: the only source that cannot be gamed by an SEO agency.

Ask recent customers what else they looked at. Read lost-deal notes. The list will be short, a little embarrassing, and correct. It misses rivals your buyers have not heard of yet, which is a different problem.

2. A keyword-overlap lookup

Verdict: the spreadsheet you were going to build, done in one run.

Competitor Finder on seogeoaeo.ai takes a domain and a country and lists the 30 sites sharing the most Google keywords with it. It flags close competitors, where 5% or more of a site's keywords are also yours, and moves Wikipedia-sized sites to their own pile so they stop pretending to be your rival. Estimated visits and average rank come with each row. It costs 38 credits a run.

What it hides: anyone who competes offline or only through ads, and much of the field if your site is tiny. It also measures search competition, not business competition, so a listicle site may outrank your actual rival. That is a feature if you care about clicks.

3. Google, by hand

Verdict: free, honest, and slow enough to make you reconsider your life choices.

Search 10 to 20 buyer phrases in a private window, log the top ten domains, count. You will learn things. You will also learn that you hate spreadsheets by keyword 30.

Note for the nostalgic: the related: operator is gone. Google removed it from its docs in 2023 and its Search Liaison confirmed it.

4. Ad libraries

Verdict: shows who has money, not who has customers.

The Google Ads Transparency Center, Meta Ad Library and LinkedIn Ad Library list who is paying to reach your audience. Search category terms, not just the names you already resent. Spend is not shown for most ads, so you see ambition, not budget.

5. Review and comparison sites

Verdict: someone already did the comparison, with their own incentives.

G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Yelp and Google Maps sort businesses by category. The "alternatives" boxes are close to what buyers actually click. They also lean toward whoever collects the most reviews.

6. Asking ChatGPT

Verdict: a mirror of what the internet said about your category last year, delivered with confidence.

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for "the best X for Y". Note the brands and the pages they cite. Ask again, because the answer changes. The cited pages are useful: a roundup that keeps getting quoted is a rival and a place to get mentioned. A single prompt is a sample, not data.

7. "Sites like X" tools

Verdict: fine for ideas, unreliable for decisions.

These usually group sites by shared audience or shared links rather than shared searches. Confirm every suggestion in the actual results.

The scorecard

So which is best

Customers for truth, a keyword-overlap lookup for scale, everything else for gaps. If you only do one paid thing, do the lookup; plans on seogeoaeo.ai start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits. If your site ranks for almost nothing yet, skip it and do the manual search instead, because the tool will mostly show you giants.