Tools for competitor research

Knowing what your competitors are doing online is not optional if you want to grow. Whether you are entering a crowded market or trying to hold ground in one, you need to understand where rivals are getting their traffic, which content is working for them and how their backlink profiles compare to yours. These six tools cover that ground well.

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most widely used SEO and backlink analysis toolkits available. The team behind it updates their index regularly, which means the backlink data tends to be fresher than many alternatives. For competitor research specifically, the features that stand out are:

• Content explorer
• Content gap analysis
• Link intersect tool
• Rank tracker
• Organic keywords report

The organic search tab is particularly useful. It gives you an estimated traffic volume for any competitor over time, shows how many keywords they rank for and lets you adjust the time period to spot trends. If you want to understand how a rival has grown their search presence, this is where to start.

2. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is one of the more powerful tools for understanding where a competitor’s traffic actually comes from. Rather than showing you raw rankings, it breaks traffic down into four channels: paid, social, organic search and direct. That split matters because it tells you which channels a competitor is investing in and where you might be able to compete more effectively.

The tool also surfaces related sites that share an audience with your competitor, which can point you towards partnership opportunities or content gaps you had not considered.

3. Link Explorer (Moz)

Link Explorer is not the newest tool on this list, but it holds its own for tracking competitor link building. Three features in particular make it worth keeping in your toolkit.

DA and PA tracking over time

The Overview section includes a Domain Authority (DA) chart that shows how a site’s score has moved as its link profile has changed. If you are reporting on link building work for a client, this chart gives you a clear visual of progress over time.

Discovered and lost links

Link Explorer flags URLs that have recently started or stopped linking to a domain. Spotting lost links on a competitor’s profile can reveal opportunities, particularly if the linking page is still live and relevant to your own site.

Side-by-side backlink comparison

The link comparison tool lets you put your domain alongside up to four competitors and compare backlink profiles directly. You can see how many linking domains each site has, which makes it easier to identify where you are behind and where you might focus outreach.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo focuses on content performance rather than links or rankings. You can search by topic or by a specific competitor’s domain to see which pieces of content have generated the most engagement across social platforms and the wider web.

This is useful when you are trying to understand what resonates with a shared audience. If a competitor’s long-form guides consistently outperform their shorter posts, that tells you something about what readers in your space actually want.

5. Owler

Owler pulls together community-sourced data on companies in your niche. You add brands to a personalised dashboard and Owler surfaces news, funding rounds and other signals that might affect how those businesses are positioned. It leans towards larger, more established brands, so it is more useful for tracking named competitors than for broad market scanning.

6. Feedly

Feedly is a news aggregator that lets you organise the sites and publications you follow into feeds segmented by topic, competitor or market trend. Rather than checking individual sites manually, you get a single view of what is being published across your industry.

There is a browser extension for adding sites to your feed without leaving the page you are reading. The free tier covers most use cases, and a Pro account unlocks additional filtering and team features if you need them.

These six tools cover different angles of competitor research, from backlinks and rankings to content engagement and company news. Used together, they give you a reasonably complete picture of what your competitors are doing and where gaps might exist. If you are building out your SEO strategy alongside your research, the posts on why keywords matter for SEO and boosting your website’s SEO in 2025 are worth reading alongside this.

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