Debug: upstream API calls (click to expand)
How it works
The Competitors Finder uses an AI-plus-verification approach to surface a ranked list of your organic competitors. The two-step pipeline is what makes it different from both AI-only competitor namers (which can hallucinate) and pure-SERP overlap tools (which require existing rankings).
Step 1: AI candidate generation. We send your domain (or page URL) to a large language model with a structured prompt asking for 5 candidate competitor domains plus a buffer of extras to account for the hallucination filter. The model emits its top picks ordered by relevance (its judgment of how directly each competitor matches your site's focus).
Step 2: hallucination filter via the link graph. Every candidate goes through our backlink index. Domains that don't exist in the link graph are dropped automatically (they didn't pass the reality check). This step doubles as the source of Domain Authority, Page Rank, and Spam Score, so the same call earns the metrics for surviving competitors at no extra cost.
Step 3: traffic + keyword enrichment. Survivors are trimmed to your plan cap (5 on the Free plan) while preserving the model's relevance order. We then look up each one's organic Estimated Traffic and Total Keyword count from our keyword index in parallel, with silent-drop reconciliation for domains the upstream has no data for.
Two modes.
- Find Website Competitors: input is a domain (e.g.
example.com); we surface competing domains. - Find Page Competitors: input is a specific URL (e.g.
example.com/pricing); we surface competing pages. Useful for finding direct head-to-head competitors on a money page rather than at the brand level.
Default sort. Results are ordered by the AI's relevance ranking by default (rank 1 = most directly competitive). You can re-sort any column. Sort by Estimated Traffic to find your biggest competitors by SEO scale; sort by Domain Authority to find the hardest ones to outrank.
Plan caps. Free plan returns 5 competitors per analysis. Daily-jobs budget: 50000 AI token units per day, shared with every other AI tool in the project. Every plan including Platinum is capped because each call costs real money against our AI provider.
Known limitations.
- Niche or very small competitors may not have enough presence in our link-index to pass the verification step. They'll be silently dropped from the AI's candidate list, even if they're relevant.
- Brand-new domains (less than a few weeks old) may not yet be in our index, so even if the AI knows about them they'll get filtered.
- Page-mode for very generic URLs (like a homepage) often returns the same set as Domain mode. The page-level distinction is most useful for product / category / pricing pages with distinct competitive sets.
- Big brands dominate. Large recognized brands take slots in the AI's candidate list, sometimes at the expense of obscure-but-direct competitors. Use Page mode against a non-homepage URL to widen the net.
What the columns mean
- Rank
- The AI's relevance ordering (1 = most directly competitive). Default sort is ascending on this column. Re-sorting by another column hides this signal until you click Rank again, so consider it the "AI says these are your closest matches in this order" view.
- Competitor
- The competitor's domain (Website mode) or specific URL (Page mode). Cross-link icons let you immediately pivot to Organic Ranking Checker, Backlinks Checker, Website Traffic Checker, Top Pages Finder, Keyword Gap Analysis, or Backlink Gap Analyzer for that competitor.
- DA (Domain Authority)
- Moz's 0-100 prediction of how well the competitor's domain ranks in Google. Useful for sizing up the link-building hill you'd have to climb to outrank them.
- PR (Page Rank)
- 0-10 score derived from Google's original PageRank algorithm, computed independently. Cross-check for DA. The two often agree, but disagreements highlight competitors that did well in one model but not the other.
- Spam
- Moz's 0-100 Spam Score. High values (60+) suggest the competitor's domain carries SEO risk signals; competing with them may be easier than DA alone implies because they're a less stable target.
- Estimated Traffic
- Modeled monthly organic-search visits to the competitor. Use this column to rank competitors by SEO scale rather than by AI relevance.
- Total Keywords
- Count of distinct keywords the competitor ranks for in Google. Broader-footprint competitors (high keyword count) imply more topical authority to compete with.
Frequently asked questions
How does this competitor finder work?
You give us your domain or page URL; we ask a large language model for 5 candidate competitors plus a few extras as a buffer, then we filter that list against our backlink index to remove any names the model invented (the upstream only returns rows for real domains in the link graph). Survivors are enriched with Domain Authority, Page Rank, Spam Score, estimated organic traffic, and total ranking keywords, then sorted by the model's relevance ranking by default.
How do I find out who my competitors are?
For SEO competitors specifically, this tool surfaces the domains an AI considers most similar to yours given what it knows about your site, then verifies each candidate against a real link-graph database. The combination matters: an AI alone can name plausible-sounding competitors that don't actually exist or don't actually rank for what you do; a link-graph alone surfaces every site that shares any backlinks with yours, which is often noisy. Pairing them filters both kinds of error.
How is this different from a SERP-overlap competitor tool?
SERP-overlap tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, SpyFu) build their competitor lists by looking at which other sites also rank for your top keywords. They're very effective when you already have organic rankings; less so when you don't. Our approach starts from the AI's understanding of who you are (industry, business model, audience) plus a real verification step against the link graph, so it works even for brand-new sites that haven't earned rankings yet.
Why are some of my obvious competitors missing?
Two common reasons. First, niche or very-small competitors may not exist in our backlink-index verification step, so even if the AI suggests them, we filter them out to keep results trustworthy. Second, the AI weights well-known brands more heavily, so an obscure but direct competitor can lose its slot to a bigger adjacent brand. The fix: use the alternate URL mode to feed in a specific competing page rather than your homepage, which usually surfaces a different set of niche competitors.
What are the four types of competitors?
The classical marketing split is: direct (selling the same thing to the same audience), indirect (different product solving the same problem), replacement (a non-obvious alternative the customer might pick instead, e.g. "do nothing", or a free DIY workaround), and perceived (anyone the customer mentally lumps in with you). This tool returns mostly direct + indirect organic competitors; replacement and perceived competitors usually need market research, not search-index data.
How do I find my biggest competitors?
Run the tool, then sort the results by Estimated Traffic descending. The competitors at the top of that view are the ones currently winning the most organic traffic in your space, which is usually a fair proxy for "biggest" in the SEO sense. Cross-link any of them to the Top Pages Finder to see which pages on their site drive that traffic, and to the Backlinks Checker to see who's linking to them.
Are competitor lookups capped per day?
Yes. The Free plan returns 5 competitors per analysis with up to 50000 AI token units per day shared across our AI-powered tools. Each cost-incurring call (the model that generates the candidate list, the verification of each candidate, the keyword + traffic lookups) is metered to keep the project's upstream costs predictable. Every plan including Platinum is capped, and the cap-hit message tells you when to come back.
Can I trust the results if they're AI-generated?
Sort-of, with the caveat that AI suggestions are filtered against a real database before you see them. The AI generates the candidate list; our backlink index only returns rows for domains that genuinely exist in the link graph, so hallucinated names get dropped automatically. The Domain Authority, Page Rank, Spam Score, traffic, and keyword counts shown are not from the AI, they're measured from our index. Treat the ranked order as informed-suggestion, and the per-row metrics as objective measurements.