The short version: you don’t need one magic tool, you need three or four cheap or free ones stacked together, checked on a schedule, not a spreadsheet you built once and forgot about. Start with SimilarWeb or SparkToro for audience and traffic, Meta Ad Library for what they’re paying to promote, and a keyword tool like Ubersuggest or the free tier of Ahrefs for what content is pulling their traffic. Everything else is a nice-to-have.
Start with the question, not the tool
Most people ask “what tool should I use” before they’ve decided what they want to know. That’s backwards, and it’s why so many people sign up for a £99-a-month subscription, poke around for twenty minutes, and never open it again. I’ve done it myself, twice, with tools I won’t name because it’s not the tool’s fault.
Before you open a browser tab, write down one of these:
- Where is their traffic coming from (search, social, paid, referral)?
- What keywords are they ranking for that I’m not?
- What are they paying to advertise, and where?
- Who is linking to them, and could those sites link to me too?
- What content of theirs gets shared or commented on?
Each of those questions points to a different tool. Trying to answer all five at once with one dashboard is how you end up with forty browser tabs and no decisions made by Friday.
The free layer: what you can find without spending a penny
This is the bit most “ultimate guide” posts skip because it doesn’t lead to an affiliate link. But useful free tools exist, and for a small business with three or four main competitors, they’re often enough.
Traffic and audience
SimilarWeb’s free version gives you estimated monthly visits, top traffic sources, and a rough split between search, direct, social and referral. The numbers are estimates, not gospel, especially for smaller sites under 5,000 visits a month where the data gets patchy. But the trend over a few months tells you something real: is their traffic growing, flat, or dying.
SparkToro is the one I point clients to most often for audience research rather than traffic. Type in a competitor’s domain or a hashtag their audience uses, and it shows you what podcasts that audience listens to, what other sites they visit, what accounts they follow on X and Instagram. I found out through SparkToro that a competitor’s audience in the coaching space was heavily following a specific LinkedIn creator I’d never heard of. That one insight led to a guest appearance that brought in eleven new leads in a month.
Content and keywords
Google itself is a research tool people forget to use. Type site:competitordomain.com into search and you can see roughly what’s indexed. Add a keyword after it and you’ll see which of their pages target that term.
For actual keyword data without paying, there’s a whole separate process worth reading if you want the detail, including how to use Google’s own autocomplete and the “People also ask” boxes as free keyword research: this breakdown of doing keyword research for SEO without paying for tools walks through it step by step. Ubersuggest gives three free searches a day per domain, which sounds stingy until you realise that’s plenty for checking one or two competitors a week rather than trying to audit ten at once.
Ads and email
Meta’s Ad Library is free, requires no login, and shows you every ad a Page is currently running across Facebook and Instagram, including how long each one has been live. If a competitor’s ad has been running for eight weeks unchanged, that’s usually a sign it’s converting, because nobody keeps paying for something that isn’t working. Google doesn’t offer the same transparency for search ads, but the Google Ads Transparency Center covers display and video.
For email, sign up to competitors’ newsletters using a separate address (I keep a Gmail account just for this, called something obviously not my real name). Watch what they send, how often, and what subject lines they reuse. It’s free, it’s slow, and it’s more honest than any tool because you’re seeing exactly what their customers see.
The paid layer: when free stops being enough
Free tools tell you the headline. Paid tools tell you the detail, and at some point the detail is worth paying for.
Ahrefs Lite runs around £99 a month and gives you full backlink profiles, historical keyword rankings, and content gap analysis between your site and up to five competitors at once. SEMrush’s equivalent tier is similar money and overlaps heavily, so there’s no need for both, pick one based on which interface you find less annoying, because you will be looking at it weekly.
Backlinks specifically deserve their own attention because they’re one of the slowest things to build and one of the fastest things to copy once you know where they came from. If a competitor got featured in a roundup post on a niche blog, you can pitch that same blog. There’s a proper process for this rather than just staring at a list of referring domains, laid out in this guide to spying on a competitor’s backlink profile without wasting a month doing it, and it’s the piece I send clients to most often because backlink research is where people waste the most time clicking around aimlessly.
SpyFu is worth mentioning for anyone focused mainly on paid search, since it shows historical ad copy and estimated ad spend going back years for a domain, which SEMrush and Ahrefs do less thoroughly.
A simple weekly process (with the numbers)
Here’s what I do, not what sounds good in a blog post:
- Monday, 20 minutes: check SimilarWeb estimates for three main competitors, note any traffic swing over 15 percent up or down from the previous month.
- Tuesday, 30 minutes: pull one competitor’s top ten pages by traffic in Ahrefs, check which ones are new since last month.
- Wednesday, 15 minutes: scan Meta Ad Library for the same three competitors, screenshot anything new.
- Thursday, 20 minutes: read the newsletter emails that landed that week from the ghost inbox.
- Friday, 15 minutes: write three lines in a shared doc, one per competitor, on anything worth acting on.
That’s under two hours a week, spread across five short sessions instead of one dreaded two-hour block that gets cancelled the first busy Monday. If you want a fuller version of this built around your specific niche rather than a generic checklist, there’s a longer process worth reading here: how to do competitor keyword research for your niche goes into how to adapt the cadence depending on how fast your market moves.
What competitor research tools cannot tell you
Here’s the bit people don’t like admitting: every one of these tools shows you what already happened. Ahrefs shows rankings from its last crawl, sometimes days old. SimilarWeb estimates traffic from a panel and modelling, not a direct feed from the competitor’s server. None of them show you why a competitor made a decision, what their conversion rate is, what their churn looks like, or whether that “winning” campaign you’re copying made them money or just made them busy.
I’ve watched businesses spend three months rebuilding a content calendar to match a competitor’s publishing pattern, only to find out later (through a mutual contact) that the competitor’s content team had been told to publish daily by a boss who thought volume equalled results, and it hadn’t moved their revenue at all. The tools showed activity. They didn’t show whether the activity worked. Chasing visible activity instead of results is the single most expensive mistake people make with competitor research, and it’s rarely mentioned because “here’s a list of ten tools” is an easier post to write than “most of what you’ll find isn’t worth copying.”
Use the data as a starting point for questions, not as an answer key.
A real example: the course creator who copied the wrong metric
A client of mine, who sells a marketing course priced at £497, spent about three weeks building a spreadsheet tracking a bigger competitor’s blog output, social posting frequency, and email cadence. The competitor posted five times a week on Instagram and sent two emails a week. My client tried to match it and burned out her small team within a month, with no measurable lift in enrolments.
What she hadn’t checked was the competitor’s actual keyword rankings, which I pulled for her in about forty minutes using Ahrefs. Turned out only two blog posts out of forty were bringing in any real search traffic, and they were both long, specific how-to guides published over a year earlier, not recent content. The daily Instagram posting was noise, possibly even a vanity metric for the competitor’s own boss. Once she stopped chasing frequency and rewrote two long guides targeting the exact terms those two winning posts ranked for, her organic traffic to the sales page grew by around 40 percent over the following four months, without adding a single extra social post. The lesson wasn’t “post less.” It was “check what’s working before you copy the volume.”
When it makes sense to bring in someone else
If you’ve got more than five or six real competitors, or you’re in a market that changes fast (paid ads, SaaS pricing, anything algorithm-dependent), doing this every week starts eating hours you probably don’t have. That’s when it’s worth paying someone to set up the tracking and hand you a monthly summary instead of you doing the digging yourself. Before you sign up for any research or monitoring tool though, it’s worth running it through a proper checklist first, because plenty of tools look impressive in a sales demo and turn out to be clunky or useless once you’re inside them daily. This guide on researching a new software tool before signing up is exactly the checklist I use before committing to anything with a monthly invoice attached.
If you’d rather hand the whole thing over, that’s a fair call too, and it’s usually cheaper than you’d think to get someone to set up a proper competitor tracking system once rather than you fumbling through it for six months. There’s a breakdown of typical costs and what you get for them in this piece on how much an AI consultant costs, which is useful even if AI isn’t the main reason you’re hiring, since a lot of competitor monitoring now runs through AI-assisted tools anyway.
And if keywords specifically are your priority rather than traffic or ads, there’s a dedicated process for pulling exactly which terms a competitor ranks for and how to prioritise them, laid out here: how do you do keyword research on your competitors, which goes further into the mechanics than I’ve space for here.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the single best free tool to start with?
SparkToro if you want to understand a competitor’s audience, or SimilarWeb if you want a rough read on their traffic. Both have usable free tiers and neither needs a credit card, which makes them the right starting point before you spend anything.
How often should I check on competitors?
Weekly, in short sessions, beats monthly deep dives. A market rarely changes so fast that daily checking is necessary, but monthly is often too slow to catch a new ad campaign or content push while it’s still fresh enough to react to.
Is it worth paying for Ahrefs or SEMrush for a small business?
If you have three or more real competitors and rely on organic search for leads, yes, one of the two is worth the roughly £99 to £120 a month, mainly for backlink and content gap data that free tools don’t show at any useful depth.
How do I find out what ads my competitors are running?
Meta Ad Library is free and shows every live ad a Facebook or Instagram Page is running, plus how long each has been active, which is a strong signal of what’s converting since underperforming ads usually get pulled within a week or two.
Related reading: 7 Data Extraction Tools That Make Product Research a Breeze and How to Do Keyword Research for Free Without Expensive Tools.
