What you’re allowed to look at
Anything public is fair game. A live website, a pricing page, an ad running on Facebook, a Google review: that’s competitive research, and it’s perfectly legal. Nobody can fault you for reading a page its owner chose to publish on the internet.
Two limits, though. Lifting a text, a visual or a site structure as-is is copyright infringement: website content is protected the moment it goes live, with no registration required. And mirroring a competitor’s positioning until customers confuse the two of you has a name as well: unfair competition. It gets litigated.
The line is clean: observe, yes. Understand why, yes. Trace over, no.
Step 1: what they changed on their site
A competitor who rebuilds their homepage isn’t bored. They saw something in their numbers. The history of their changes is the most honest document they will ever produce about their business.
Wayback Machine
Paste their homepage URL, pick a date two years back, compare it to today. What you’re looking for isn’t the design: it’s the main headline, the price on display, the order of the services. If their pitch went from « web agency » to « e-commerce partner », they narrowed their target. If a price vanished from the page, that offer wasn’t selling.
Free, no account. Its limit: low-traffic sites are only archived a few times a year, and JavaScript-heavy pages archive poorly.
Visualping or changedetection.io
The Wayback Machine looks at the past; these tools watch the future. You give them a page (pricing, offers, job listings) and they email you the moment it moves. The careers page is the most underrated of the three: three sales roles opening at once means funding or expansion is coming.
Visualping: a few free pages per month. changedetection.io: free and open source, but you host it yourself.
Step 2: what their site is built with
The tools a competitor installs cost money and time. If they keep them, they pay off. That’s free information about what works in your market.
Wappalyzer
A browser extension: open their site, click, see their stack. CMS, booking tool, payment provider, chat widget, analytics. If they added online booking six months ago and it’s still there, it worked for them.
BuiltWith
Same idea, deeper, with a history of technologies added and removed over the years. That history is where the value sits: it tells you what they tried and then dropped. A tool pulled after three months is a failed test. You just saved those three months.
The free tier allows a handful of lookups; full history is paid. Watch for false positives: BuiltWith sometimes flags leftover scripts from tools nobody uses anymore.
The right click
Not a tool, a reflex. « View page source », then Ctrl+F for <title> and description: you’re reading the exact words they’re targeting on Google. And add /sitemap.xml to their domain and you get every page they have, including the ones in no menu. The pages a competitor builds without promoting them are usually their SEO bets.
Step 3: where their traffic comes from
SimilarWeb
The free version gives you the breakdown: Google search, social, paid, direct, email. The breakdown is what matters, not the volume. A competitor at 70% paid traffic is fragile: they stop the day the budget stops. A competitor at 70% organic has built an asset you won’t catch up on in a quarter.
Free, no account, for the broad strokes. Its real limit: below roughly 5,000 monthly visits, the numbers are extrapolated from panels and get genuinely unreliable. On a local competitor, read the proportions and never the absolute figures.
Ahrefs free tools and Ubersuggest
Enter a competitor’s domain and you get their most-visited pages and the keywords driving them. Free quotas are tight (a few queries a day), but that’s enough for the question that actually matters: which page earns them the most? It’s almost never the homepage.
Step 4: what they spend on advertising
This is the part most people skip, and it’s the richest. European law forces large platforms to make their ads public. Meaning: the message your competitor pays to broadcast is free for you to read.
Meta Ad Library
Every ad running on Facebook and Instagram, searchable by page name. You see the creative, the copy, and above all how long each ad has been live. The date is the signal: an ad running for eight months is profitable. Nobody burns budget that long for fun. An ad launched last week is a test.
Google Ads Transparency Center
Same principle for Google: the ads they buy, the format, the region. Cross-referenced with SimilarWeb, it tells you whether they’re paying for traffic on terms they can’t win for free.
LinkedIn Ad Library
Essential in B2B. LinkedIn ads reveal the exact job title they’re targeting, often before it shows up anywhere on their website.
Step 5: what their customers hold against them
Their reviews aren’t about them. They’re about the market, and the frustrations aimed at them are probably the same ones aimed at you.
Open their Google listing or their Trustpilot profile and filter for 3-star reviews. Five stars are polite. One star is an accident. Three stars are written by people who bought, saw the whole thing, and explain precisely what was missing. It’s the only place a customer tells you what they would have paid more to get.
Add a Google search like site:reddit.com "competitor name": outside their own ecosystem, people speak without a filter.
What these tools will never tell you
They show you decisions, not results. You can see a competitor rebuilt their pricing page. You don’t know whether it lifted sales or whether it’s the mistake they still regret. You can see they’re pushing an offer. You don’t know if it’s profitable or if it exists to fill an empty schedule.
That’s the classic trap of competitive research: mistaking a competitor’s activity for their success. Plenty of companies diligently copy the bad ideas of their market, because everyone else is copying them already.
And then there’s the thing none of these tools can measure: what your competitor doesn’t do. The empty space on their site, the service they don’t offer, the client they turn down. What you take from them isn’t what makes you win. What they left on the table is.
The routine: 90 minutes a quarter
Do it rarely, but do it properly. Three competitors maximum, and one file with a line each: current headline, prices, main traffic source, longest-running ad, the complaint that keeps coming back in their 3-star reviews.
Reread that file next quarter. What you’re looking for is never the snapshot. It’s the movement. A competitor who changed their headline three times in a year is still hunting for their market. One who hasn’t touched it in three years has found it.
Then close the file and go talk to your customers. Research tells you where to look. It will never tell you what to do.