How to spy on competitors legally: 15 places to look

You can spy on competitors legally by reading three kinds of public information: what they publish about themselves, what platforms and governments require to be published about them, and what their customers say in public. That covers almost everything worth knowing. The skill is knowing where to look, and where to stop.

Below are fifteen places, what each reveals and roughly how long it takes. Then the line not to cross, which is clearer than most people assume.

Fifteen legal ways to spy on competitors

What they advertise

1. Google Ads Transparency Center. At adstransparency.google.com, search for a competitor by advertiser name or website and filter by region and date. You see the ads they have run and when. Where an ad shows its destination, visit that page too: an ad that has run for months usually points at a page they believe converts.

2. Meta Ad Library. The Meta Ad Library shows every active ad across Facebook, Instagram and Meta's other apps. Outside the EU and UK, ordinary ads appear only while they are running, with just a start date, so screenshot what you find. Ads shown in the EU or UK stay in the library for a year after their last impression, with reach and targeting details, according to Meta's help page.

3. LinkedIn and TikTok. LinkedIn's Ad Library keeps ads for a year after their last impression on LinkedIn, which makes it the best free source for B2B rivals. TikTok's Commercial Content Library launched in 2023 with European ads only, so check which regions it covers before assuming a rival is not advertising there. Every library, with what each shows and hides, is in the ad libraries guide.

What their website gives away

4. The sitemap. Add /sitemap.xml to their domain. You get every page they want indexed, usually with last-modified dates. New location pages, comparison pages and integration pages are a plan written in URLs. How to find all pages on a website covers sitemaps that are hidden or split.

5. Pricing, now and then. Screenshot today's pricing page with the date in the filename. Then open the same URL in the Wayback Machine and look at one snapshot per quarter. Using the Wayback Machine for competitor research shows how to read the history.

6. Help centre, docs and changelog. Release notes show how fast they ship, and what. Help articles document limits the sales page never mentions. A public status page, if they have one, shows how reliable they really are.

7. Tech stack. BuiltWith or the Wappalyzer browser extension list the tools a site runs: analytics, chat, testing, booking, CRM. A testing script tells you they run experiments, so the page you see may not be the one everyone sees.

What they are planning

8. Job ads. Their careers page plus the main job boards. Look at the role, the location and the tools named. Three sales roles in a new country is expansion. An engineer hired to build a named integration is the roadmap. Job ads are written to attract candidates, so they say more than the company would ever tell a competitor.

9. Company filings. In the UK, Companies House is free to search. Small companies can choose not to file a profit and loss account, and micro-entities can file a simplified balance sheet only (GOV.UK), so for most private firms expect a balance sheet rather than revenue. You still get directors, owners, loans secured on the business and year-on-year changes. In the US, listed companies file with the SEC, free to search on EDGAR, and the annual 10-K usually describes competition and risks in their own words. How to find a private company's revenue goes further.

10. Trademarks and patents. Product names are often registered before launch. Search the USPTO trademark database or the UK IPO register by owner name, and Google Patents by assignee. Slow-moving, but early.

What their customers say

11. Reviews. Google, Trustpilot, G2, Capterra. Read the three-star reviews: fair about what is good, specific about what is not. A complaint that repeats across sites is a weakness you can build a message around.

12. Reddit and forums. Search their brand name and their domain. People describe the switching story there, and the price they actually paid, in a way they never would in a review.

What they say in public

13. Webinars, talks and podcasts. Founders and marketing leads describe strategy, channels and sometimes numbers to rooms full of peers. Search YouTube and podcast apps for the founder's name. Register for their webinars under your own name.

14. Their emails. Subscribe to the newsletter with your work address. Count the sends, note the offers, see how often they discount and how they follow up after a download.

15. Their product, bought honestly. Buying or trialling a competitor's product under your own name and company is normal. Read their terms first: many software terms forbid using an account to build a competing product or for benchmarking, and if theirs do, respect it. The fallback is a mutual customer who is happy to show you around, sharing nothing confidential.

Where the line is

Competitor spying stops being research the moment you deceive someone or go where you were not invited. One test covers both law and ethics: would you be comfortable if the competitor knew exactly how you got it?

Never:

• Pretext. Posing as a prospect, journalist, student or job candidate to get a demo, an interview or a price list.
• Misrepresent yourself in any sign-up, survey or call. Real name, real company.
• Get in where you are not invited. Someone else's login, guessed passwords, unlisted staging sites, or scraping anything behind a login.
• Take confidential information from people. Asking a candidate or a new hire about their current or former employer's plans, deals or customer lists.

US trade secret law draws the line in almost those words. "Improper means" includes "theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, or espionage through electronic or other means", and does not include "reverse engineering, independent derivation, or any other lawful means of acquisition" (18 U.S.C. § 1839). Other countries differ in detail, and this is not legal advice. If you are unsure about a method, ask a lawyer before, not after.

The grey areas, answered:

• Visiting their website. Fine, but assume they can see your company in their analytics, because some B2B tools identify the organisation behind a visit.
• Talking to their customers. Fine if you say who you are, and never ask about anything covered by a confidentiality agreement.
• Hiring their staff. Normal. Put in writing that you do not want any of their former employer's confidential material, and mean it.

For the wider picture of what competitive intelligence covers, see what competitive intelligence actually is.

Making it a routine

Fifteen sources is a research project. As a habit, split them by how fast they change:

Our own Figo covers part of the first two columns once a week: Google, Meta and TikTok ads, new pages and blog posts, pricing pages, rankings, Instagram and Facebook posts, Reddit threads, and Google and Trustpilot ratings. Ours, so judge accordingly. It does not cover LinkedIn ads, job ads, filings, trademarks or competitors' emails, so those stay manual whatever you use.