How to Find Competitors of a Website in 2024

You can find a website's competitors using a mix of manual Google searches and specialized SEO tools. A good starting point is to simply search for your most important keywords and see who shows up. After that, you can dive deeper with platforms like Semrush or Ahrefs to get a data-driven list of sites competing for the same organic traffic.

Why You Need to Look Beyond Obvious Rivals

Thinking you already know all your competitors is one of the most common blind spots I see in digital marketing. Your biggest business rival—the one with a storefront just down the street—might not be your most significant threat online at all. The digital space is a completely different arena, filled with unexpected players all fighting for the same eyeballs.

Your real competition is anyone and everyone ranking for the keywords your customers are searching for. This simple shift in perspective reveals a much wider battlefield. Suddenly, your toughest online opponent might be a hugely popular blog, a niche affiliate site, or even a major news publication that happens to review products like yours.

The Dangers of a Narrow View

If you only pay attention to direct business competitors, you're operating with incomplete intel. Let's say you sell high-end coffee makers. You're not just up against other appliance brands. You're also competing with a whole host of others.

Review Sites: A popular tech blog’s "Best Coffee Makers of 2024" roundup can siphon off a huge chunk of ready-to-buy traffic before it ever gets to you. For example, if a customer searches "best drip coffee machine," they're more likely to click on a Wirecutter or CNET review than a direct brand page.
Affiliate Marketers: That solo blogger or influencer earning a commission for recommending a competitor's product? They are directly intercepting your potential customers. A YouTube creator's "My Honest Review of the Breville Barista Express" video can sway thousands of purchase decisions.
Content Hubs: Think about websites dedicated to the art of coffee brewing, bean sourcing, and techniques. A site like Perfect Daily Grind builds immense trust and authority with the very audience you want to reach, even if they don't sell machines themselves.

These "SEO competitors" are actively winning the search traffic that could have—and should have—been yours. Ignoring them is like preparing for a big game by only studying the other team's quarterback. You're leaving yourself exposed. To really compete, you need the full scouting report on everyone on the field.

This wider view is absolutely critical for understanding where you truly stand in the market. When you identify every type of rival, you can build a much smarter, more resilient SEO strategy and often find opportunities your direct competitors have completely missed. A great next step is to start tracking your performance against this wider set of players by learning more about share of voice measurement.

Uncovering Competitors with Smart Google Searches

Before you drop a dime on fancy software, you can dig up a ton of competitive intel with a tool you already use every day: Google. The trick is to stop thinking like a regular user and start searching like an SEO. Solid, manual research is the bedrock of any good competitor analysis.

The first move is to master advanced search operators. These are simple commands you add to your search to get much more specific results. For finding competitors, one of the most useful operators out there is related:. It’s a direct instruction telling Google to show you websites it thinks are similar to another site.

Putting the Related Operator into Practice

Let's say you run an artisan coffee bean site, "TheDailyGrind.com," and you know your main rival is "BeanBox.com." Instead of just poking around their website, head to Google and type this in:

related:beanbox.com

This search does more than just list other coffee sellers. It surfaces sites that Google’s algorithm connects to BeanBox based on content, user behavior, and backlink profiles. You might uncover niche subscription boxes, local roasters with a strong online presence, or even influential coffee blogs you'd never considered as competition. This is a surprisingly effective way how to find competitors of a website that are flying just under your radar.

Pro Tip: Don't stop at your top competitor. Run this search on your own domain, too. The results can be a real eye-opener, showing you exactly how Google categorizes your site and who it thinks your peers are. You might be surprised.

Digging into Community Hubs and Forums

Another great manual tactic is to go where your customers hang out online. Your audience isn't just typing keywords into Google; they're in forums, Reddit, and Facebook groups, talking about products, asking for recommendations, and airing their grievances.

Searching these community hubs for your core keywords gives you an unfiltered, ground-level view of the competitive landscape.

Look for comparison threads: Search for phrases like "Brand X vs. Brand Y" or "best alternative to [your product]." These threads are pure gold. For example, search Reddit for "monday.com vs asana" to see real users debate the pros and cons of project management tools.
Identify community favorites: See which names keep getting recommended over and over again. Those are the brands that have earned real trust. A search for "best running shoes for beginners" in r/running will quickly reveal brands like Brooks, Hoka, and Asics as community darlings.
Analyze pain points: What are people complaining about when they discuss your competitors? This tells you exactly where their weaknesses are and where you can win. In a thread about a popular software, comments like "the UI is so clunky" are actionable insights for your own product development and marketing.

For our coffee example, you could hop over to Reddit's r/Coffee and search for "favorite coffee subscription" or "Blue Bottle alternative." The brands that consistently pop up in those organic conversations are your real competitors in the minds of your most passionate potential customers. It takes more time than running an automated tool, but the insights you get are often far more valuable.

Using SEO Tools for a Data-Driven Analysis

While manual searches give you a good feel for the terrain, relying on them alone is like navigating with a compass instead of a GPS. To get the full picture, you need hard data, and that’s where SEO tools come in.

Platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs do the heavy lifting for you. They sift through millions of keywords and SERPs to show you who you’re actually up against, not just who you think your competitors are.

This data-first approach often turns up surprising results. A tool doesn't care about a company's brand recognition or how long they've been around; it only cares about which domains are ranking for the same keywords you are. You'll likely uncover "invisible" competitors—affiliate sites, niche blogs, and content hubs—that are quietly winning over your target audience.

Diving into Keyword Overlap Reports

The feature you’ll lean on most here is usually called something like an "Organic Competitors" report. It’s pretty straightforward: pop in your domain, and the tool cross-references it against its massive keyword index. In seconds, you get a list of websites that rank for a similar basket of keywords.

These reports typically highlight a few key metrics:

Competition Level: A score showing how closely another domain’s keyword footprint overlaps with yours. Higher means you're fighting for the same real estate.
Common Keywords: The exact number of keywords that both you and a competitor rank for, usually within the top 100 search results.
Competitor's Keywords: The total volume of organic keywords the other domain ranks for, which gives you a sense of their overall SEO scale.

This is a much more reliable way to find a website's competitors than just guessing. It puts real numbers to the competitive landscape, showing you precisely who to keep an eye on.

The dashboard below visualizes the kind of deep analysis these tools make possible. It's focused on backlink metrics, which are another critical piece of the puzzle when you're sizing up the competition.

This kind of visualization is invaluable. It breaks down complex data into something you can actually use, showing you where a competitor’s authority is really coming from.

Interpreting the Data for Actionable Insights

Tools like Semrush, which has been a staple since 2008, have completely changed the game. They offer a full suite of features—from keyword gap analysis to backlink audits—that help you figure out why certain competitors are outranking you and where you can find new opportunities.

For instance, many professionals invest around $139.95 per month for plans that include these competitive analysis features. For an agency, this is a no-brainer. They can monitor exactly who is outranking their clients and watch traffic trends to find and exploit gaps in the market before anyone else.

Pro Tip: Look for domains with high keyword overlap but a completely different business model—like a review site competing with your e-commerce store. This doesn't just reveal a rival; it can spark ideas for new content strategies or even partnership opportunities.

Once you have your data-backed list of competitors, the real work begins. The goal isn't just to know who they are, but to dissect their strategy. This means digging into their content, analyzing their link profile, and understanding their site structure.

To help with that next phase, we've put together a full guide on how to do SEO competitor analysis. It’s all about turning that raw data into a clear plan of action.

While keyword research tells you who you're up against in the SERPs, digging into backlink profiles is a more advanced way to map out the competitive terrain. The logic is straightforward: if an influential site in your niche links to a competitor you already know about, they're probably linking to other key players, too.

Following these digital breadcrumbs is a potent strategy for uncovering competitors. You're essentially seeing who the established authorities in your field are endorsing with their links. This doesn't just reveal your rivals; it can also point you toward some great link-building opportunities.

Finding Competitors at the Link Intersection

To pull this off, you'll need a solid SEO tool with a massive backlink index. I'll use Ahrefs for this walkthrough, but the same principles apply to other major platforms.

First, plug a known competitor's domain into the tool's Site Explorer and head over to their backlink report. This gives you a raw list of every single website linking to them.

Of course, you don't want to get lost in a sea of thousands of low-quality or irrelevant links. The trick is to filter this list down to find the high-authority blogs, industry news sites, and resource pages. Once you have that refined list, you can start exploring each of those linking sites to see who else they're talking about, reviewing, or linking to.

Here’s a look at the Ahrefs dashboard, which is your starting point for this kind of deep dive. It gives you that initial high-level view of a domain's authority and backlink profile.

This is where the real investigation begins.

Turning Backlink Data into Strategic Insights

Tools like Ahrefs, which first hit the scene back in 2010, are now the go-to for this kind of work because of their gigantic databases. By 2025, it had become a standard for its granular metrics, letting SEOs benchmark against competitors at scale. Its ability to generate detailed reports on competitor backlinks is invaluable for shaping both your link-building and content strategies. For more on this, Zapier has a great piece on the power of these competitor analysis tools.

Let's walk through a real-world scenario. Say you run an online store selling eco-friendly cleaning supplies, and your main competitor is "GreenCleanCo."

You start by plugging GreenCleanCo.com into Ahrefs and filtering their backlinks to only show links from blogs with a high Domain Rating (DR).
You quickly spot that a popular zero-waste lifestyle blog, "SustainableHome.com," has linked to GreenCleanCo several times. Bingo.
Now, you head over to SustainableHome.com and find their big "Ultimate Guide to Eco-Friendly Cleaning" article.

In that guide, you'll likely find that they don't just link to GreenCleanCo. They also mention and link out to three other eco-friendly brands you've never even heard of. And just like that, you’ve discovered three new, highly relevant competitors to track.

This method works so well because it uncovers competitors through the impartial lens of a trusted third party. If an authoritative blog in your space deems a brand worthy of a link, that’s a huge signal that they’re a significant player you need to have on your radar.

Before we move on, it's worth taking a moment to compare the big three tools in this space. Each has its strengths, and the right one for you often depends on your specific focus—be it link data, keyword gaps, or market-level traffic analysis.

Competitor Analysis Tool Feature Comparison

Here’s a quick breakdown to help you see how the core features stack up across the top platforms.

Feature	Semrush	Ahrefs	Similarweb
Backlink Analysis	Extensive backlink database with gap analysis and authority scores.	Widely considered the industry leader for backlink index size and accuracy.	Provides referring domain data, but less focused on granular link metrics than SEO-specific tools.
Keyword Research	Robust keyword tools, including gap analysis, topic research, and position tracking.	Powerful keyword explorer with excellent difficulty scores and SERP analysis features.	Offers keyword data focused on traffic share and user engagement across different channels.
Traffic Analytics	Provides detailed estimates of organic, paid, and referral traffic for any domain.	Strong organic traffic estimates, but historically less emphasis on overall market traffic analysis.	A market intelligence leader, offering deep insights into traffic sources, audience, and engagement.
Content Analysis	Tools for content auditing, topic ideation, and on-page SEO recommendations.	Content Explorer helps find top-performing content by topic and analyze its backlink profile.	Less focused on content creation, more on analyzing top pages and audience interests.
Best For	All-in-one SEO and marketing professionals who need a comprehensive suite of tools.	SEO specialists and link builders who require the most accurate and extensive backlink data.	Market researchers, strategists, and investors needing high-level traffic and audience intelligence.

Ultimately, many professionals end up using a combination of these tools to get the full picture. Ahrefs or Semrush are fantastic for the nitty-gritty SEO details, while a tool like Similarweb gives you that broader view of a competitor's entire digital footprint.

Looking Beyond Keywords: Using Audience and Traffic Analysis Tools

So far, we've been digging into competitors through the lens of SEO—keywords, backlinks, and search rankings. That's essential, but it's only half the story. What happens when we stop asking what people search for and start asking where they go online?

That's where audience and traffic analysis tools change the game. They give you a completely different, and often more revealing, angle on your competitive landscape.

These platforms look past the SERPs to map out actual user behavior across the web. You get to see which other websites your target audience visits, uncovering competitors who are vying for their attention, even if you don't share a single keyword.

The Power of Audience Overlap

The key idea here is audience overlap. It's simple, really. If the same people who visit your website are also spending time on another site, that other site is a competitor. They are competing for your audience's time and attention, which is often a more valuable currency than their wallet.

This is my favorite way to find indirect competitors that keyword research completely misses.

Let's say you run a financial news blog. A keyword-based tool will predictably spit out other news sites. But an audience analysis tool might show that your readers also hang out in specific investing forums, read fintech review sites, or are active on personal finance subreddits. Suddenly, you see a much richer picture. These are all competitors for your audience's mindshare.

Tools like Similarweb are brilliant for this. You can get a high-level overview of similar sites in a single dashboard.

Just like that, you have a list of potential rivals based not on what they rank for, but on who visits them. It's a list grounded in real human behavior.

This kind of analysis has come a long way. When Similarweb first launched back in 2007, it was already providing incredible insights into web traffic. Fast forward to today, and these platforms are indispensable. By 2025, you simply won't be able to build a competitive strategy without understanding these audience-level traffic patterns.

By analyzing audience overlap, you get a more holistic view of the digital ecosystem your customers inhabit. This reveals not just who they might buy from, but what content they consume, what communities they join, and what brands they trust.

How to Put Traffic Analysis into Action

Getting started is usually straightforward. Just plug your domain into a tool and look for a "Competitors" or "Similar Sites" report. The platform’s algorithm crunches its massive dataset of user browsing habits and generates a list of domains that share a significant slice of your audience.

But the real magic is in how you use that list. It's not just about finding more enemies to fight.

Spot Content Gaps: See what topics these indirect competitors are nailing. If that investing forum your audience loves has a super popular weekly market recap, that’s a flashing neon sign that you should probably create one for your financial news blog.
Find Partnership Opportunities: That fintech review site your audience frequents? They aren't just a competitor; they could be a perfect partner for a co-branded webinar or a content collaboration. For instance, you could offer to write a guest post on their blog in exchange for a link back to yours.
Sharpen Your Personas: Understanding the full spectrum of your audience’s interests helps you build richer, more accurate customer personas. If you see your users also visit sites about sustainable living, you can infer they value eco-friendly practices, which could influence your brand messaging.

These platforms are a critical piece of a modern competitive analysis puzzle. If you're looking to build out your analytics stack, we've put together a guide on digital marketing analytics tools that can help you find the right fit.

Common Questions About Finding Competitors

As you start digging into the competitive landscape, a few questions always pop up. Getting them sorted out from the beginning saves a lot of headaches and makes sure your analysis actually leads to results. Let's walk through the big ones I hear all the time.

How Many Competitors Should I Actually Track?

It’s tempting to build a massive list of every potential rival, but trust me, that path leads to paralysis. You end up with a spreadsheet full of data you never look at. You don't need to track everyone.

The sweet spot I've found over the years is a tight, focused list. Aim for 3-5 direct competitors—the ones who sell what you sell—and another 3-5 top SEO competitors, who might not sell the same thing but consistently outrank you for your money keywords.

This gives you a manageable group of 6-10 total competitors. It's enough to get a real sense of the market but not so many that you can't do a proper deep-dive on each one.

What’s the Real Difference Between Direct and SEO Competitors?

This is a critical distinction, and one a lot of people miss. A direct competitor is the obvious one. If you sell artisan coffee beans online, so do they. Simple. For example, Trade Coffee and Counter Culture Coffee are direct competitors.

An SEO competitor, on the other hand, is anyone fighting you for eyeballs on the search results page. For that same coffee brand, an SEO competitor could be a major food magazine with a "best coffee beans" roundup, a popular blogger who reviews brewing equipment, or even an affiliate site dedicated to espresso machines. Good examples include Food & Wine magazine or a popular YouTube channel like James Hoffmann.

The real insight comes from understanding that your audience doesn't always distinguish between these types. To them, the top search result is simply the most authoritative answer, whether it comes from a store or a blog.

You have to analyze both groups because they're all competing for your customer's attention, just in different ways.

How Often Should I Be Doing This?

Competitor analysis isn't a "set it and forget it" task. The market is always in motion—new players emerge, old ones pivot, and algorithms change the rules of the game overnight.

A good cadence is to perform a full, deep-dive analysis every quarter. This is your chance to spot major strategic shifts, identify emerging threats, and see how your own efforts are measuring up. For example, this quarterly review could involve rerunning keyword gap analyses and checking for new, high-authority backlinks your competitors have acquired.

For your core list of 3-5 key rivals, I recommend a quick check-in every month. A simple review of their new content, keyword movements, and social activity is usually enough to make sure you aren't caught off guard by a sudden campaign. You could set a calendar reminder to spend one hour on the first Monday of each month reviewing their latest blog posts and top-performing organic keywords.

If you want to get more tactical about evaluating the rivals you've identified, this a complete guide to competitor analysis is a fantastic resource for structuring your ongoing research. Keeping a steady pulse on the competitive field means you can adapt quickly instead of just reacting.

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