Websites like a competitor, in five short points

Looking for websites like a competitor? Five points cover what you need to know, from what "like" means to what a lookup costs.

1. "Like" has three meanings

A website can be like a competitor because it ranks for the same searches, because the same buyers compare the two, or because the same articles mention both. Those are three separate lists. A cooking blog might match a meal kit brand on searches and never appear on a buyer's shortlist. Decide which kind you need before you start, or you will mix them up.

2. Searches are the one kind you can count

Shared Google keywords can be measured. Put the competitor's domain, not yours, into a keyword overlap tool and it lists the domains chasing the same searches.

The one we use is Competitor Finder on seogeoaeo.ai. Give it any public domain and a Google country and it returns up to 30 sites, each with shared keywords, total keywords, estimated monthly visits and average rank. Sites where at least 5% of their keywords overlap are flagged as close competitors. Giant general sites are kept apart, so they do not crowd the list.

Why the share matters: an online encyclopedia ranks for millions of terms, so it will share a few hundred with almost any business. A small specialist shop where one in ten of its keywords matches the competitor's is a much closer twin, even though the raw count is lower. Sorting by share puts that shop near the top where it belongs.

Once you have the close matches, you can go a step further and see what brings them visitors. Competitor Keywords lists a site's top 100 Google keywords by estimated traffic for 35 credits.

3. Buyers and mentions are free to find

For the brands buyers compare, type the competitor's name and "vs" into Google and read the suggestions. Google says autocomplete reflects real searches. Then skim a few independent alternatives articles and keep the names that repeat. Skip any list written by one of the vendors.

For mentions, put two similar brands in quotes and search for both. The other names on the pages you find form the rest of the group. Asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same question twice works too; trust the brands named every time.

4. Every method has a blind spot

The keyword lookup sees only Google search. A rival that sells offline or lives on paid ads will not appear. It covers whole domains, one country per run, and visit numbers are estimates. The free methods give names but no numbers, and AI answers change from one session to the next. Google's related: search, once the standard shortcut, is missing from Google's current list of operators.

The practical fix is to use two methods and compare. A brand that turns up in both the keyword list and the buyer list is a core rival. One that appears only in the keyword list is probably a blog or media site competing for clicks, not for customers.

5. What it costs

Competitor Finder costs 38 credits a run. The cheapest seogeoaeo.ai plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits. You see the price before every run, and a run that fails before giving a result is refunded. Unused monthly credits do not roll over.

If you want to follow a competitor's rankings day by day, pick a suite with a rank tracker instead. seogeoaeo.ai runs one-off lookups.

In one line

Start with the free buyer and mention checks, then run one keyword overlap lookup on the competitor's domain to see who fights it for search traffic.