How to find your real competitors, not the ones you think about
Four sources that produce different competitor lists, why the differences matter, and how to end up with the three names worth watching.
Ask any founder who their competitors are and you get a confident answer in two seconds. It is usually wrong, or at least incomplete, because it is a list of companies they think about rather than companies they lose to.
Four sources produce four different lists. The gaps between them are the interesting part.
Source 1: your sales calls
Ask whoever takes the calls: which names come up, and in which deals.
This is the most accurate list you will ever get, and it is free. It is also the smallest, usually two or three names, because buyers do not shortlist twelve options.
What this list is good for. Positioning, battlecards, pricing. These are the companies whose existence costs you money.
What it misses. Anyone who beats you earlier, before a conversation ever happens. Which is the next list.
Source 2: the search results
Search your five most commercial terms in an incognito window. Write down every domain on page one.
You will get three kinds of result.
Direct competitors. The expected names.
Unexpected competitors. A company you had not considered, which is worth an hour of your attention.
Non competitors that own the SERP. Directories, review sites, listicles, a magazine. These are not commercial threats but they occupy the demand, and being absent from a listicle that ranks first is a real loss.
That third group is the one most people dismiss and should not. If a "best X in Y" article outranks every vendor, getting into it is worth more than outranking it.
Source 3: the keyword overlap
This needs a tool, and the free approximation is worth doing first.
Take a competitor you know and search a distinctive phrase from their site in quotes. See who else uses it. Crude but revealing.
With a tool, the proper version is a domain comparison: who ranks for the same keywords you do, and how much overlap there is. Semrush, Ahrefs and similar all do this. The output is usually surprising, because it includes companies that solve the same problem in a different way.
The useful distinction. A company with 60% keyword overlap and a different product is competing for attention, not for the sale. Worth watching, not worth a battlecard.
Source 4: the assistants
This list did not exist a few years ago and it is the one almost nobody has run.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, with web search on: recommend a company that does [what you do] for [who you serve] in [where]. Ask it ten different ways.
Write down every name that comes back, and how often.
Why this list is different. Assistants lean on directories, listicles and review sites rather than on the search rankings directly. The result is that companies strong in third party coverage appear here even when they rank poorly, and companies strong in traditional SEO sometimes do not appear at all.
If a name is on this list and not on your other three, that is a company winning a channel you are not playing in.
Reading the four lists together
Put them side by side. Four patterns are worth naming.
On all four. Your genuine primary competitor. Watch them closely.
On sales but not search or AI. They win deals through relationships, referral or outbound. Marketing effort will not reach them, and copying their website will teach you nothing.
On search and AI but not sales. They capture attention but do not convert against you, or they serve an adjacent buyer. Worth watching for content ideas rather than positioning.
On AI but nowhere else. Usually a company with strong directory and review presence. Often smaller than you. This is the most actionable finding on the page, because whatever they did to get there is cheap and repeatable.
Narrowing to three
You cannot watch twelve companies properly. Score each candidate on three questions.
- Do we lose deals to them? Weight this heaviest.
- Do they reach the same buyer? Not the same product, the same person.
- Are they moving? A company that has not changed its website in two years is not going to surprise you.
Take the top three. Keep a second list of five names to glance at quarterly.
Write it down and date it
The last step, and the one that gets skipped: put the list in a document with the date and the reasoning.
Six months later somebody will ask why you are tracking a particular company and nobody will remember. Lists that outlive their reasoning are how teams end up carefully monitoring a rival that pivoted away from them a year ago.
Review it every six months. The AI list especially, because it moves faster than the others.
Questions people ask
How many competitors should I track?
Three to five. Past that, the extra names rarely change a decision and the effort grows linearly.
What is a search competitor?
A site that ranks for the terms you want, whether or not it sells what you sell. A directory or a magazine can be your biggest search competitor while being no commercial threat at all.
Should I track a much bigger company?
Track them for ideas, not for benchmarking. What works for a company a hundred times your size usually does not transfer, and the comparison is demoralising and useless.
How often should the list change?
Review it every six months. Lists go stale quietly, and there is nothing worse than a year of careful monitoring on a company that stopped mattering.
See it on your own competitors
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