Find your business competitors before they find your customers

If you want to find your business competitors, start with the people who already chose between you and them. Founders often open a tool first and end up with a list of sites that rank for the same words but never meet them in a deal. Work from the closest evidence outward: customers, lost deals, ad spend, review sites, and only then search data.

Step 1: ask the people who decided

Send your last ten new customers one question: "What else did you look at before you picked us?" Read your lost-deal notes for the names that keep coming up. This takes a day and costs nothing, and it is the most accurate list you will ever have. It is also the shortest, which is the point.

Write each name down with the reason it came up: cheaper, faster to set up, a feature you lack.

Step 2: follow the ad money

Rivals who pay to reach your buyers tell you a lot about who they think those buyers are. Three public libraries show you who is spending:

• Google Ads Transparency Center: ads by advertiser.
• Meta Ad Library: active ads across Facebook, Instagram and other Meta products.
• LinkedIn Ad Library: ads by company, useful for B2B.

Search your category words, not only the brands you know. New names here are often companies too young to show up in customer conversations yet.

Step 3: read the comparison pages

G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Yelp and Google Maps sort businesses by category. The "alternatives" and "compare with" sections are built from buyer behaviour on those sites. If a name appears there next to yours, buyers are weighing you against it.

Step 4: check who holds your searches

Now look at search, because this is where a different kind of rival lives. A publisher that ranks for "best invoicing tool for contractors" sells nothing, yet it stands between you and the buyer. You need to know who those sites are.

The quick way is a keyword-overlap lookup. Competitor Finder, from seogeoaeo.ai, takes your domain and a country and returns the 30 sites sharing the most Google keywords with you. Close competitors, where at least 5% of their keywords are also yours, are kept apart from very large general sites. You also see estimated visits and average rank for each. A run is 38 credits.

For a founder, that number matters. The cheapest plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, so one competitor lookup uses about 2% of it. Each tool shows its credit price before it runs, and a run that fails before it returns a result costs nothing.

A caveat worth repeating to your team: the finder reads only Google rankings. If a rival wins through referrals or a sales team, it will not appear. If your own site is new, it may find few close rivals; steps 1 to 3 cover that gap.

Step 5: ask the assistants

Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for shortlists. Ask the same questions they would. Note each brand named and each page cited, and run each prompt more than once, since answers change. A review page that keeps getting quoted is a place you want your name on.

Step 6: cut to five

Merge the lists. Mark any company that appears in customer answers, ad libraries and search results: that one is taking deals from you right now. Keep three to five names in total. A longer list makes for a nice slide and rarely changes a decision.

What it costs in total

If you want the longer version of this method with examples, it is in the seogeoaeo.ai guide to finding competitors.