How to find your positioning in your competitors' reviews
Three star reviews are the most honest competitive research available, they are free, and almost nobody reads them properly.
Your competitors pay to collect testimonials. Their customers write the truth anyway, in public, for free. Reading it properly is the highest return hour in competitive research and hardly anyone does it.
Read the three star reviews
Skip the five stars. They are written by happy customers, often prompted, and they tell you what marketing wants you to hear.
Skip most of the one stars. They are usually a single bad incident, a billing dispute or a refund gone wrong. Real, but not a pattern.
Three star reviews are written by people who still use the product, are broadly satisfied, and have something specific that bothers them. They have no axe to grind and nothing to gain. They say things like:
Each of those is a positioning opportunity, stated by a paying customer of your competitor.
Where to look
G2 and Capterra for software. Filter to three stars and sort by recent.
Google reviews for local and service businesses. Read the ones with actual text.
Trustpilot for consumer and ecommerce.
Reddit, searching their brand name and their domain with the url: operator. This is where people say what they would not put their name to on a review site, and it is often the most useful of the four.
App store reviews, if they have an app. Brutally honest, consistently overlooked.
What to record
Read fifty reviews across two or three competitors. In a spreadsheet, one row per complaint, with columns for which competitor, which source, and the quote.
Then count. By review fifteen you will see the same three things repeating, and those three things are the competitive landscape.
Separate them into two piles.
Fixable complaints. Slow support, a missing integration, a clunky onboarding. These get fixed eventually. Do not build your whole position on one, because it can disappear in a release.
Structural complaints. Things baked into what they are. An enterprise tool is complex because it serves enterprises. A tool with every data source is overwhelming because it has every data source. A cheap tool has thin support because it is cheap.
Structural complaints are where positioning lives, because your competitor cannot fix them without becoming a different company.
Turning it into a sentence
The mistake here is attacking. Naming a competitor and listing their flaws reads as insecure and invites the same in return.
The move is to state your own approach plainly, in a way that happens to answer the complaint.
If their reviews repeatedly say the alerts are noisy, you do not write "unlike Northwind, our alerts are not noisy". You write: "One email on Monday. Six things that changed, in plain words." A reader who has that complaint recognises it instantly. A reader who does not simply learns what you do.
If their reviews say setup takes a week, your sentence is about what happens in the first ten minutes.
If their reviews say the reporting is limited, show the report.
Checking against yourself
Read your own three star reviews with the same discipline. Two things fall out.
What you are actually weak at, as opposed to what you worry about. These are rarely the same, and teams spend enormous effort on the wrong one.
What people praise in their own words. The phrases customers use for what they like are better copy than anything you will write internally. Take them verbatim.
Keeping it fresh
Review sentiment shifts, usually slowly and occasionally overnight after a bad release or a price change. A competitor whose recent reviews are noticeably worse than their older ones has changed something, and that is worth knowing the month it happens rather than a year later.
Check quarterly: review count, average rating, and read the newest ten for each competitor. Fifteen minutes.
Review count and rating over time are also part of what AI assistants read when they build recommendations, so a competitor's rising review count has a second effect beyond reputation. Our own Figo tracks review count and rating weekly for each competitor alongside their pages, ads, rankings, content, social and AI visibility, at $49 a month for three competitors. But the reading, which is the part that produces the positioning, is a human job and always will be.
Questions people ask
Which reviews are most useful?
Three star reviews. Five stars are marketing, one stars are usually a delivery incident or a refund dispute. Three stars are written by people who kept using the product and still had something to say.
How many reviews do I need to read?
Fifty across two or three competitors is enough to see the patterns. You will notice the same complaint repeating by review fifteen.
Where should I look?
G2 and Capterra for software, Google and Trustpilot for services, and Reddit for what people say when the company is not in the room.
What do I do with what I find?
Turn the most repeated complaint into a sentence on your homepage. Not an attack on them, a plain statement of how you handle the thing they do not.
See it on your own competitors
Figo checks their ads, pages, rankings, reviews and AI answers every week, then tells you what to do in plain words. Set up in two minutes.
Keep reading