How to do competitor research in an afternoon, for founders

How to do competitor research when you run a company and have one free afternoon: decide what you need to learn, pull the free official data first, then buy only the estimates you will act on. Below is the order we would use, the questions each step answers, and what it costs on seogeoaeo.ai, which sells reports by the run rather than by the seat.

Before you start: write down three decisions

Research without a decision attached turns into a slide nobody reads. Pick the calls the work should inform, for example:

• Which topics should our next ten articles cover?
• Should we start Google Ads, and with what message?
• Which partners or publications should we pitch?

Each step below maps to one of those.

Hour one: name the field

Spend fifteen minutes searching your most valuable phrases and listing who holds page one. Then run Competitor Finder (38 credits) on your own domain in your main market. It lists sites that share your Google keywords and marks the close ones: sites where at least 5% of their keywords are also yours. Large general sites get their own group so they do not crowd the list.

Two caveats a founder should know. It will not show companies that win deals through sales or paid ads alone. And if your site is young and ranks for little, you may only see giants; use the rivals you already know instead.

Pick three rivals. More than that and the afternoon is gone.

Hour two: size and shape

Run Domain Overview (50 credits) on each of the three. You get, for one market, how many keywords the domain ranks for, estimated monthly Google visits, the ad cost of those visits, the keywords it pays for with an estimated ad spend, link counts and a link rank from 0 to 1,000.

Read those totals side by side. A rival with many visits and few links is probably winning on brand. A rival with heavy ad spend and thin organic traffic is buying growth. These are modeled numbers, good for comparing the three, not for a board deck.

Cost so far: 38 + 150 = 188 credits.

Hour three: content and ads

For content decisions, run Keyword Gap (85 credits) between your site and the rival that looks most like you. It returns searches where the rival ranks in the top 20 and you do not rank at all, sorted into blog topics and terms worth bidding on. That list is your editorial backlog.

For the ads decision, start free. Google's Ads Transparency Center shows a verified advertiser's ads with format, region and last-shown date. Meta's Ad Library lists active ads across its apps, and LinkedIn's library keeps ads for a year after their last impression. If you want it summarized, Competitor Google Ads (15 credits) counts a domain's ads by format, shows how long each has run, and reads the copy of its longest-running text ads. Long-running ads are the ones a rival keeps paying for, which is a decent sign they work.

Nobody can tell you which keywords a rival bids on or what it spends; Google does not publish either.

Hour four: who vouches for them

For the partnerships decision, run Backlink Finder (70 credits) on the strongest rival. You get its 100 strongest linking sites and 50 link texts, with spam and strength estimates. Strike the spam, then look for publications, directories and partners that would plausibly mention you too.

The bill

The Indie plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, so the full afternoon uses under a fifth of it. Runs that fail before producing a result are refunded, and each tool shows its price before it runs.

What this does not give you

There is no rank tracking and no history. If you want to watch positions move every week, that is a different tool, usually a full SEO suite. For a founder making quarterly calls, one deliberate afternoon per quarter is often enough.

Hand it off

Every tool is also available through MCP and a REST API, so a teammate's AI agent can rerun the same afternoon next quarter with the same inputs. Start with Competitor Finder on your own domain.