Straight answer: almost everything a competitor puts in public view is fair game to study, copy the strategy from, and learn from, but the moment you lie to get information they haven’t made public, record a call without consent, or scrape personal data to build a list, you’ve stepped out of research and into something a solicitor gets involved in. Most of the useful stuff sits in plain sight anyway. You just have to know where to look.
The stuff that’s completely fair game
Their website. Their ads. Their social posts. Their reviews on Trustpilot and G2. Their job listings. Their pricing page, if they’ve got one. Their newsletter, if you sign up with your real name and a real email address (more on the fake-name trick in a minute). All of that is out in the world for anyone to see, and there’s nothing dodgy about writing it down, screenshotting it, or building a spreadsheet out of it.
Public filings count too. In the UK, Companies House makes any limited company’s accounts free to download, and they have to file within nine months of their year end. You won’t get a breakdown of ad spend, but you’ll get turnover bands, director pay if it’s disclosed, and whether they’re growing or quietly shrinking. In the US, anything filed with the SEC sits on EDGAR, free, for public companies. Trademark applications are public record too. A £170 filing at the UK IPO for one class, or a few hundred dollars with the USPTO, can tell you a product name is coming months before the launch email goes out.
The five places I check every month
I’m not precious about this. I check the same handful of sources for every competitor I track, and it takes about forty minutes a month per business.
- Meta Ad Library, free, shows every ad a Page is running right now, including ones that stopped converting weeks ago and never got pulled.
- Google Ads Transparency Center does the same thing for search and display.
- Their careers page and LinkedIn job posts. Three “Head of Paid Social” listings in a month tells you exactly where next quarter’s budget is going.
- The Wayback Machine, free, so I can see what their homepage said a year ago versus now, which shows me what messaging they’ve dropped.
- Review sites. Nothing tells you what a competitor’s customers think faster than the one-star reviews they can’t delete.
None of that requires a login you shouldn’t have, a name you don’t own, or a tool that breaks a robots.txt file. It’s just paying attention to what’s already sitting there. I wrote about a version of this monitoring approach years ago in a social media round up from 2017, and the sources have barely changed, only the platforms have.
The phone call that taught me where the line is
A few years back, a woman rang my office saying she was organising a conference and wanted to know my speaking fees, availability, and what was included. Fine, standard call, I gave her the numbers. Three weeks later I found out, through a mutual contact, that she worked for a rival speaker bureau doing competitive research on pricing structures across the industry. She’d never claimed to be booking anyone. She’d just let me assume it.
Was it illegal? No. Was it slimy? Completely. And that’s the bit most articles on this topic skip over, because it’s uncomfortable: a huge amount of “competitor research” that businesses do every day sits in that grey space where nothing was technically a lie, but nothing was honest either. Ringing a competitor’s sales line pretending to be a genuine prospect to get their pitch and pricing isn’t fraud in most cases, because you haven’t made a false statement of fact, you’ve just withheld your motive. Lawyers will tell you that’s legal. Your own conscience might have a different opinion, and so might your competitor if they ever find out and start doing the same to you.
Where it tips into illegal
Here’s where the line moves from grubby to risky.
- Scraping a website against its terms of service and then using that data commercially can breach contract law and, in the US, has been argued under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, though courts have gone both ways on this depending on whether the data was password protected.
- Recording a sales call with a competitor’s rep without telling them, in a two-party consent state in the US, or without a lawful basis under UK wiretapping rules, is a genuine legal problem, not a grey one. I’ve written before about how many businesses get this wrong even with their own customers, in a piece on why your AI meeting notetaker might be breaking the law, and the same rules apply in reverse if you’re the one doing the recording on someone else’s call.
- Scraping personal data, names, emails, job titles, off LinkedIn or a competitor’s customer list to build your own marketing database has no lawful basis under GDPR unless you can show legitimate interest and a proper balancing test, which most businesses skip entirely.
- Copying protected creative wholesale, their exact ad copy, their exact landing page design, their exact case study wording, can breach copyright even if the underlying idea (a 14-day free trial, a comparison table, a founder story) is completely unprotected and always was.
- Getting a current employee of a competitor to hand over pricing spreadsheets, roadmaps, or client lists is theft of confidential information regardless of how casually it’s offered over drinks.
The pattern in all five is the same. Public information, fine. Information someone had to break a promise, a contract, or the law to give you, not fine, even if you never asked them to break anything.
The bit nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about all of this: most competitor research never gets used for anything. Businesses spend hours building spreadsheets of a rival’s ad copy, their email cadence, their pricing tiers, and then the document sits in a shared drive gathering dust because nobody changes their own marketing off the back of it. I’ve done it myself. I once spent an entire Sunday mapping a competitor’s whole funnel, screenshot by screenshot, and then did precisely nothing with it for eight months.
Competitor research feels like strategy. Half the time it’s procrastination wearing a blazer. If you’re going to spend forty minutes a month on this, spend it, but only if you’ve already decided what you’ll do differently depending on what you find. Otherwise you’re just watching someone else’s business for entertainment.
What’s worth doing with what you find
The competitors worth studying hardest are the loud ones, because they’ve done half your research for you. Someone like Grant Cardone puts nearly everything about his offers, his funnels, his pricing tests, out in public because the bravado is the marketing. That’s a gift if you’re trying to reverse-engineer what’s working in a market, because you’re not guessing, you’re watching a real-time public test with someone else’s ad spend.
Job postings are the most underrated source. If a competitor suddenly needs a “Retention Marketing Manager,” their churn is worse than they’re admitting. If they’re hiring three SDRs and no marketers, they’ve decided outbound beats inbound for now, which tells you something about their unit economics you’d never get from their website.
Their own sales calls, recorded legally, with consent, and used for your own team’s training, are a completely different story to secretly recording a competitor’s calls. If you want to understand why the consent question matters so much for your own business too, I covered the trust side of this in a piece on why an AI notetaker on your sales calls can cost you more than you think, because prospects notice when they’re being recorded even when it’s completely legal, and it changes how honest they are with you.
A simple test before you do anything
When I’m not sure whether something crosses a line, I ask one question. Would I be comfortable telling the competitor exactly how I got this piece of information, to their face, and having them shrug? Signing up for their newsletter with my real name, fine, they’d shrug. Screenshotting their public Instagram ad, fine. Ringing their sales line under a made-up job title to extract a quote I’d never publish honestly, they wouldn’t shrug, and neither should I. It’s not a legal test. It’s a decency one. But it catches most of the problems before a solicitor ever needs to.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to sign up for a competitor’s email list under a fake name?
Using a fake name to receive marketing emails isn’t illegal in itself, since you’re not defrauding anyone or accessing anything restricted. It becomes a problem only if you use that access to obtain non-public pricing under false pretences and then republish confidential material, or if the sign-up requires verified identity for a genuine reason, like a private beta.
Can I use screenshots of a competitor’s ads on my own comparison page?
Screenshotting a competitor’s public ad to describe or critique it factually is generally covered by fair dealing or fair use in most jurisdictions, but reproducing their exact copy, images, or design wholesale for your own commercial promotion can breach copyright. Describe and compare, don’t republish wholesale.
Is scraping a competitor’s website against the law?
Scraping publicly available, non-password-protected pages is legally murky but has generally been treated more leniently by courts in cases like hiQ v LinkedIn in the US. Scraping data behind a login, ignoring a site’s terms of service explicitly, or scraping personal data of individuals without a lawful basis under GDPR is a much clearer legal problem.
Can I get in trouble for calling a competitor’s sales line pretending to be a customer?
In most cases, no, because you haven’t made a false statement about a material fact, only withheld your motive. It’s legal in the UK and US in almost all circumstances. It’s just worth knowing it’s the kind of thing that damages trust badly if the competitor ever finds out, and many industries are small enough that they will.
Related reading: Why Your LinkedIn Account Got Restricted (and How to Fix It) and What Are the Legal Ways to Spy on Competitors’ Websites.
I go much deeper on this in the digital marketing guide.
