Type your category into a search engine and you get the biggest brands and the best-funded advertisers. Those are rarely the companies that will lose a customer to you. The ones that will are often small, focused, and on page three, or not on Google at all.
This guide covers where to find the competitors that matter, and how to decide which ones count.
Why search results are not enough
Search results rank pages, not competitors. They reward domain authority and ad budgets, which favours large, general products over the specialist that serves exactly your customer. They also miss every competitor that is not a software product: the agency, the freelancer, the internal team, the spreadsheet.
A complete competitor map has to start from the customer, not from the category name.
Start from the customer’s job
Write down what your customer is trying to get done, in their words: “take phone orders without missing calls during the dinner rush”, not “voice AI”. Then ask: what do they use for that job today? Anything they could pay for, hire or improvise instead of you is a candidate.
Eight places to look
Search, past page one
Problem and “alternatives” queries
Review sites
Established and newest products
Launch platforms
Products too new to rank
App marketplaces
Focused add-ons on a platform
Communities
What customers recommend
Job boards
Labour as the alternative
Funding news
Well-funded newcomers
Competitors' own pages
The rivals they worry about
1. Search, beyond page one
Search the problem, not just the category. Try “how to [job]”, “[job] software”, “[job] for [customer type]” and “[competitor] alternatives”. Go several pages deep. Comparison and “alternatives to” articles are especially useful because they list competitors for you.
2. Software directories and review sites
Category pages on software review platforms list products by category with filters for company size and industry. Sort by most reviewed and by newest: one shows the established players, the other the emerging ones.
3. Launch platforms
Product launch sites surface products that launched recently, including many that never appear in search results. Search them for your problem keywords.
4. App marketplaces and integration directories
If your customer uses a platform (an ecommerce store builder, a CRM, a workplace chat tool), its app marketplace lists add-ons that solve problems on top of it. Many focused competitors live only there.
5. Communities where your customer talks
Forums, subreddits, industry groups and Slack or Discord communities. Search for the problem and read what people recommend to each other. These recommendations are the competitors your customer actually knows about.
6. Job boards
Search job listings for roles that do the job manually. If companies hire people to do it, that labour is an alternative to your product, and sometimes the largest one.
7. Funding news
Search startup funding news for your category. A recently funded competitor may not rank yet but will soon, and its announcement usually describes its positioning.
8. Your competitors’ own pages
Competitors’ comparison pages, integration pages and “switch from” pages name the rivals they worry about. Every competitor you find leads to more.
Qualify each candidate
You will end up with a long list. For each company, ask three questions:
- Does it serve the same customer?
- Does it do the same job?
- Would your customer compare it with you before buying?
Three yeses is a direct competitor. Some yeses is an indirect competitor or an alternative. The guide on direct vs indirect competitors has examples of each. Drop anything that fails all three, even if it is famous. A padded list is worse than a short one, because it hides the companies that matter.
What to record for each competitor
For every competitor you keep, note:
- Type: direct, indirect, emerging or alternative.
- Customer: who they are built for, from their homepage and case studies.
- Pricing: plans, prices and pricing unit, from their pricing page (see the pricing analysis guide).
- Key features: and what they hold back for expensive plans.
- Signals: recent funding, launches, hiring and review ratings.
- Source and date: the URL and when you read it. Everything above goes out of date.
What if you find no competitors?
Look again, more broadly. If you still find nothing, there are three possibilities: the search was too narrow, customers solve the problem with something that does not look like a product, or nobody has the problem badly enough to pay. The first two are common and fixable. The third is the most common reason for an empty market, which is why an empty market deserves more suspicion than a crowded one.