Every competitor keyword checker method, ranked by honesty

Every competitor keyword checker method promises to reveal what a rival ranks for. Most of them reveal what the rival hoped to rank for, which is the same information a press release gives you about quarterly results. We ranked the common methods from most to least honest about the gap between those two things.

1. A ranking data tool, run on the right country

Honesty: high, with footnotes.

A proper competitor keyword checker looks up a domain in Google results data and tells you which searches its pages actually show up for, at what position, with an estimate of the visits each brings. This is the only method on the list that reports outcomes rather than ambitions.

Our pick is the Competitor Keywords tool on seogeoaeo.ai. You give it a domain or any page on it and a country. It returns up to 100 keywords for the whole domain, sorted by estimated traffic, each with position, volume, difficulty, intent, cost per click, estimated visits and the URL that ranks. It also hands you a pre-sorted list of easy blog topics with brand searches removed, plus the keywords worth bidding on, plus the pages that earn the site the most visits. One run is 35 credits, and the price is shown before you press the button, which is more transparency than most of the industry manages.

The footnotes: every number is an estimate from a data provider, not something Google signed off on. Data is per country, so a British company checked against US results looks like a hobby project. Two different tools will disagree on the same domain, so pick one and stay loyal. And it does not track your own rankings over time; if you want a chart that goes up and to the right every morning, Semrush Position Tracking exists for that.

2. Reading their ads

Honesty: medium-high.

Google's Ads Transparency Center shows search ads a company is running. Money is the one signal companies rarely fake. An ad that has run for months is an ad someone keeps approving the invoice for, which suggests the search behind it brings in customers.

What it will not tell you: the keywords they bid on. Google does not publish those, so treat any list of "their bid keywords" as someone's estimate.

3. Their sitemap

Honesty: medium.

/sitemap.xml, or the sitemap line in /robots.txt, lists every URL they want indexed. Since most teams put the target phrase in the slug, it reads like a to-do list of keywords. It is an accurate to-do list. It says nothing about which items got done.

4. Title tags and H1s

Honesty: medium.

The title and main heading usually carry the primary keyword, and the subheadings carry the secondary ones. This tells you exactly how they phrase their intentions. A beautifully optimized title on a page nobody visits is still a beautifully optimized title on a page nobody visits.

5. Using site: searches

Honesty: low, by its own admission.

site:rival.com plus a topic shows some of their pages on that topic. Google's own documentation says the results are not exhaustive and that big sites should not expect all their URLs to appear. A method whose documentation includes a disclaimer about itself earns fifth place.

6. Keyword Planner with a competitor URL

Honesty: low for this question.

Google Keyword Planner can take any website and suggest keywords based on its content. It is a useful idea generator. It is not a competitor keyword checker. It answers "what is this page about", not "what does this page rank for". Many guides blur the two.

7. Asking a chatbot

Honesty: depends entirely on whether it has data.

A chat model with no search data guesses keywords from what it knows about the company. That is method 4 with extra confidence. A model connected to a ranking data tool, through MCP for example, is method 1 with a nicer interface.

The quick summary

The free methods are worth twenty minutes to learn a rival's vocabulary. Then pay for one run to find out which of their plans worked. seogeoaeo.ai plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, listed on its pricing page.