A competitive analysis tells you how rivals attract, convince, and keep the customers you're trying to win — but the surfaces where that competition plays out have expanded.
Prospects are forming opinions about your brand inside AI search platforms before they ever visit your site. Standard competitive analyses miss this. They cover competitors' websites, marketing, and reputation, but stop short of AI visibility, which increasingly drives buyer decisions.
In this article, you’ll learn what competitive analysis is, how to run one across all three surfaces of a competitor's brand, and how to spot where competitors are winning in AI search. You'll also get a free template to organize your findings.
What is competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis is the process of researching and documenting competitors’ business strategies (like their product, marketing, and sales strategies) so you can use those insights to sharpen your own approach. It's also called competition analysis or competitive market analysis.
In 2026, a complete competitive analysis covers three surfaces:
- What the brand says about itself through its site’s marketing and sales content
- What third parties say about the brand through user reviews, press coverage, and community discussions
- What AI search platforms say about the brand, including if and how often it’s mentioned, the sentiment of those mentions, and which prompts it shows up in
The first two surfaces are familiar territory. The third is newer, and it shapes which brands prospects consider before they ever reach a website.
Types of competitors
To get the most valuable insights from competitive analysis, you need to identify and analyze the right competitors.
There are three types of competitors: direct, indirect, and aspirational. Each plays a different role in your strategy, and shows up differently across the three surfaces of competitor analysis.
Direct competitors
Direct competitors target similar audiences and offer similar products or services. Analyzing them should be your top priority because they’re the easiest to learn from and compare against.
Say you run a food delivery app targeting urban professionals. DoorDash is a direct competitor because it delivers restaurant meals to the same audience.
Indirect competitors
Indirect competitors offer different products or services but solve the same core need. They're worth analyzing after direct competitors, as changes in their strategies often signal broader market shifts that affect demand.
For a food delivery app, meal kit services like HelloFresh are indirect competitors — they reach busy people who want home-cooked meals, but with ingredient kits rather than restaurant meals delivered ready to eat.
Aspirational competitors
Aspirational competitors are industry leaders you admire and model your strategy after, even if you're not competing for the same customers. Study them when you're planning to grow beyond your current business model.
For a food delivery app, Uber is an aspirational competitor. It targets a similar audience and offers a similar service, but its platform also includes ride-hailing and package delivery. These are services the app could add as it scales.
Benefits of competitor analysis
The benefits of competitor analysis include:
- Benchmarking your performance: Comparing your traffic, rankings, conversions, and brand presence against direct rivals shows you where you stand and where you're falling behind
- Learning from others’ successes and failures: Studying what worked and didn't work for competitors accelerates your own path forward
- Identifying AI visibility gaps: Knowing where competitors appear (and don't appear) in AI-generated answers shows you which on- and off-site signals to strengthen
- Discovering untapped opportunities: Identifying market gaps reveals where competitors are overlooking customer segments, marketing channels, or key features
- Sharpening your positioning: Understanding how competitors describe themselves and their products helps you differentiate your brand more clearly to your target audience
How to do a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis is a multi-step process that covers your competitors' websites, third-party coverage, and AI visibility.
By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of how your competitors operate, and where your brand fits in.
1. Copy our competitive analysis template
Make a copy of our free competitive analysis template to organize your findings as you work through the steps below.
2. Identify competitors
Identify competitors using a combination of research methods, since no single method gives you a complete view of who you’re up against.
Find competitors by:
- Searching for your product and service types in Google and looking at the top-ranking results
- Asking AI search platforms for a list of businesses with similar products or servicesz
- Testing related prompts to see which brands are mentioned or recommended
- Checking third-party content like reviews, listicles, and comparison articles to see which brands buyers research alongside you
- Asking your sales team about other solutions that prospects tend to consider
- Surveying former customers to identify which competitors they switched to
- Reviewing the competitive domains the Semrush Market Overview tool lists in your “Market Players” report
- Viewing the “Competitors” report in the Organic Rankings for your domain
Once you’ve listed competitors, sort them by type: direct, indirect, and aspirational. Then, select three direct competitors to analyze. This way, you’ll gather a range of high-impact insights without getting overwhelmed.
You can add more competitors later, including indirect and aspirational ones, as you extend your analysis.
3. Analyze competing products and services
Analyze competing products and services to better position and price your offerings to meet customer needs.
Start with value propositions. Study your competitors' marketing content to understand what problems they solve, how they solve them, and who they help. Compare these value propositions against yours to better differentiate your offerings.
Next, study your competitors’ product or service information to understand:
- Core features and capabilities: The main functionalities and unique features your competitors offer. Explore how these features meet (and don’t meet) customer needs, so you can capitalize on market gaps.
- Pricing: Review your competitors’ pricing to identify whether they target premium, mid-range, or budget segments. Use this to evaluate the competitiveness of your pricing, especially if you target the same segment.
Record your findings in your competitive analysis report.
4. Uncover competitors’ marketing channels and content formats
Uncovering what marketing channels and content formats drive the most traffic to competing sites provides valuable insights for your own marketing strategy.
Check competitors’ top traffic sources with a competitive analysis tool like Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit. Enter a competitor’s domain and click “Analyze.”
Scroll to the “Traffic Channel Distribution” section to view the top traffic sources for the competitor’s domain.
Next, go to the toolkit’s Top Pages tool to see which channels drive the most traffic to individual pages. Click any page to see its entrance sources.
Study these traffic sources to gain insights. For example, a high portion of referral traffic may indicate the competitor has partnerships with industry influencers or has been featured on popular sites in your niche.
Next, review your competitors’ social media presence, including which platforms they use, the content formats they use, and engagement levels.
Evaluate the other types of content your competitors create as well: blog posts, email newsletters, webinars, or online courses. For example, if competitors have a blog, what kind of content do they publish, and how frequently?
Use a tool like AI Traffic to learn which AI search platforms send your competitors the most traffic.
Higher AI referral traffic often indicates stronger visibility signals across a competitor’s site, brand reputation, and third-party coverage.
5. Research your competitors’ sales processes
Research your competitors' sales processes to understand how they connect with prospects throughout the buying journey.
The sales process typically involves four stages:
- Presenting the offering: Understand how competitors communicate value and demonstrate their solutions to prospects. For instance, businesses that sell big-ticket items may have dedicated sales teams that work closely with prospects.
- Following up: Study how competitors stay in touch with prospects. Tactics include sending automated email reminders and making phone check-ins.
- Closing: Look at how competitors convert interested prospects. They might offer discounts, money-back guarantees, or product bundles to encourage purchases.
- Retention: Consider how competitors encourage customers to make repeat purchases or stay subscribed to their services. Perhaps they offer a loyalty scheme or exclusive customer content.
Start by engaging with your competitors’ marketing materials: subscribe to their newsletters, request demos, and attend their webinars. As you do this, observe how they communicate, follow up, and guide prospects through each stage.
Pay attention to their messaging style, contact frequency, and the tools or offers they use to build trust and move leads toward a purchase. The messaging competitors use throughout their sales process reinforces the brand associations AI platforms pick up across their site and third-party coverage.
6. Study customer feedback and ratings
Studying competitors' customer feedback and ratings reveals opportunities to win business from their customers and others like them.
These same signals also shape AI visibility: AI search platforms retrieve signals from user reviews, forum mentions, and third-party coverage when deciding which brands to mention and recommend.
Public sources of customer feedback and ratings include:
- Review aggregator platforms like G2 and Trustpilot. See what customers praise competitors for and what they’re unhappy about. Pay attention to recurring themes — if multiple customers complain about the same issue, it’s likely a significant weakness you could capitalize on.
- Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and LinkedIn. What prospects and customers say about competitors on these platforms can reveal where they shine or fall short. Use tools like Mention or Brand Monitoring to track social mentions.
- News publications: Check reputable news outlets for mentions of your competitors, and evaluate both the positive and negative comments. The Brand Monitoring tool can help with this.
Once you've gathered the feedback, use it to refine your positioning around competitor gaps and strengthen your off-site presence by encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews.
AI search platforms weigh review quality and consistency when forming brand associations, so a strong review presence pays off in AI visibility too.
Document your findings in your competitive analysis report.
7. Assess AI visibility
Assess competitors’ AI visibility to learn how AI search platforms mention and cite them.
Start by launching the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit, entering a competitor’s domain, and clicking “Check AI Visibility.”
The tool will display the competitor’s overall AI visibility (as a score out of 100) and the volumes of mentions and citations — both overall and across various AI search platforms.
Compare this against your own domain to see where you stand.
Next, switch to the Narrative Drivers tool to see your competitor’s share of voice, which reveals how often it appears in non-branded prompts.
You'll also see sentiment trends, the topics AI platforms most often associate with the brand, and the top domains driving AI citations for non-branded prompts in your category.
Prioritize building your brand presence across these domains to improve your AI visibility.
Use the Competitor Research tool to compare your AI visibility against your competitors' side by side.
Enter your domain alongside up to four competitor domains, then click "Run competitor analysis" to see where rivals get cited and your brand doesn't.
Navigate to the “Topics & Prompts” report, click “Prompts” to view prompts, and then click “Missing.”
Note the prompts you want AI search platforms to feature you on. Then, set up the Prompt Tracking tool to monitor their performance in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.
Repeat the tracking setup for your competitor’s domain. Then, record all findings in your competitive analysis report.
8. Establish competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
Establish competitors’ strengths and weaknesses based on the detailed information you’ve gathered, so you can evaluate where you stand against them.
A competitor's strengths might include strong product-market fit, effective marketing campaigns, or consistent positive sentiment across reviews and AI answers. Weaknesses might include limited AI visibility, gaps in customer support, or pricing that's misaligned with their market segment.
Document your findings in your competitive analysis report.
9. Determine your positioning
Determining your positioning translates everything you've learned about your competitors into a clear angle for your own brand.
Conduct an analysis of your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Then, define the unique value you offer.
Maybe it’s a feature that solves a pain point more effectively, a superior onboarding experience, or a more flexible pricing structure. These differentiators form the core of your unique value proposition.
Also consider the customer segments you'll target. If you've identified a customer segment your competitors have overlooked, focus your product development and marketing efforts on serving their needs.
Once you've mapped your positioning, consider how it translates to AI search. The attributes AI platforms associate with your competitors, such as their pricing, reliability, and use case fit, are shaped by the same signals you've analyzed throughout this process.
Your positioning should account not just for how you differentiate on your website, but also for how you want AI systems to describe and recommend you.
Record everything in your competitor analysis report.
Competitive analysis example (step by step)
I ran a basic competitive analysis for a fictional coffee subscription service to give you an idea of how the process works and the insights you can get.
Let’s go through this competitive analysis example, step by step:
Competitor analysis
First, identify competitors by Googling relevant keywords like “coffee subscription” and noting which sites appeared near the top.
I also looked at coffee-related roundups and reviews, like the Bon Appétit roundup below.
Next, I used Semrush’s Market Overview tool to find more competitors. Since I didn’t have a domain for my fictional coffee subscription service, I used a competitor’s domain instead.
I also ran the same competitor domain through the Organic Rankings tool to see if additional competitors surfaced.
After confirming that these competitors offered coffee subscriptions, I sorted them into direct, indirect, or aspirational competitors.
I then chose three direct competitors to analyze: Bean Box, Trade Coffee, and Atlas Coffee Club.
Product strategy analysis
Next, I analyzed my competitors’ product strategies by reviewing their landing pages, frequently asked questions pages, and checkout flows.
I noticed all three competitors offer gift subscriptions, which signals demand and tells me I should offer them too.
Marketing strategy analysis
Analyzing my competitors’ marketing strategies with the Traffic & Market Toolkit, I learned my competitors get significant direct traffic — but this is likely driven by existing customers.
Organic search was a key channel (especially for Bean Box), while AI traffic was a largely untapped traffic source. So, I could use SEO to attract leads from search engines and AI search platforms. Referrals, email marketing, and paid search could also be good traffic sources.
I reviewed my competitors’ social media accounts and recorded key insights in my competitive analysis report.
The analysis pointed to a few moves:
- Pursue Instagram marketing with influencer partnerships, since competitors favor this approach
- Focus video content on TikTok rather than YouTube — competitors post frequently on TikTok but haven't published YouTube videos in years
- Skip Facebook and X, where competitors have stopped posting regularly. Threads is a better option for short-form text content, given Trade Coffee's consistent activity there.
Finally, I analyzed my competitors’ onsite content.
Bean Box attracts substantial blog traffic even though it hasn’t published new content since 2022. There’s a good opportunity to attract visitors with fresh, high-quality content.
Sales strategy analysis
I analyzed my competitors’ sales strategies by exploring their product landing pages, checkout flows, and email newsletters.
All competitors use a quick quiz to help prospects choose the right coffee subscription. The quiz’s interactive nature gets prospects invested in the outcome, so they’re more likely to convert.
For example, here’s part of Atlas Coffee Club’s quiz:
All three brands also use special offers to encourage conversions, especially for long-term subscriptions and bulk purchases. Most of these offers go out through email newsletters, which helps them convert leads and re-engage churned customers.
Feedback analysis
For feedback analysis, I searched for “[competitor] reviews” on Google and reviewed relevant results on third-party review sites, industry blogs, and online communities.
When I could copy reviews in bulk, I pasted them into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize recurring themes, so I didn’t have to analyze the reviews manually.
I paid attention to recurring praises and complaints. Common praises indicate features that drive customer satisfaction, while frequent complaints reveal opportunities to outperform competitors by addressing unsolved gaps or frustrations.
AI visibility analysis
I then conducted an AI visibility analysis by running my competitors’ domains through Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit.
According to the Visibility Overview tool, all three competitors have relatively low AI visibility, with the bulk of their AI mentions coming from Google’s AI Overviews. So, investing in agentic search optimization (ASO) could be an impactful way to increase brand awareness and sales.
Next, I used the Narrative Drivers tool to check my competitors’ shares of voice:
Narrative Drivers also informed me that the top domains by citations for the coffee subscription service industry are reddit.com, en.wikipedia.org, tastingtable.com, and bonappetit.com.
Getting a Wikipedia page would likely be challenging in the short term. So, to improve my coffee subscription service’s AI visibility, I’d focus on building a Reddit presence and getting featured in Tasting Table’s and Bon Appétit’s product reviews and “best of” listicles.
Since I don’t have a domain to run through Competitor Research, I used Visibility Overview to research prompts featuring my competitors.
A few prompts, like “Coffee Collection and Cafés” and “How can I order coffee online easily,” featured multiple competitors.
Appearing in AI-generated answers for these prompts is a priority, so I set up the Prompt Tracking tool to monitor them across my competitors’ domains. I’ll do the same for my domain when it’s ready.
Determining my positioning
Finally, I determined my positioning by reviewing my findings on each competitor and conducting a SWOT analysis for my brand.
Where competitors excel, I looked for ways to match or exceed those strengths, such as building appeal with Gen Z consumers, a segment in which competitors already have a foothold.
Where competitors were weak, I looked to fill the gaps. The most obvious one: AI visibility.
Prioritizing ASO gives my brand a chance to win AI mentions and recommendations while competitors remain under-invested.
Create your competitive analysis report
A modern competitive analysis should capture how each rival shows up across all three surfaces: their site, third-party coverage, and AI visibility.
If you haven’t already, make a copy of our competitive market analysis template to organize your findings and turn them into an actionable strategy.
Keep these tips in mind as you fill it out:
- Base decisions on data: Let real data — not assumptions or guesses — guide your conclusions to make more impactful decisions
- Keep your approach consistent: Analyze each competitor using the same methods and depth so your comparisons stay reliable and your strategic insights stay balanced
- Customize your report: Adjust our competitive analysis template to meet your needs. For example, you might want to analyze competitors’ technology and infrastructure, culture and talent, and business partnerships, which our template doesn’t cover.
- Pair tools with thoughtful analysis: Competitive intelligence tools surface the data, but the patterns and nuances come from your own analysis. AI chatbots like ChatGPT can speed up your analysis.
A Semrush account gives you access to the tools you'll need throughout this process, including the Traffic & Market Toolkit for checking competitors’ traffic sources, and the AI Visibility Toolkit for finding AI visibility gaps.
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