Let's say you have a suspicion. There is one competitor — maybe two — who always seem to be a step ahead. They appear when you do not. They get the calls you wish were yours. Something specific is going on, and you would very much like to know what.
The good news is this: you do not need an SEO agency, you do not need a paid tool, and you do not need to understand a single line of code to find out. Most of what a competitor is doing well — or badly — is visible from the outside, if you know exactly where to look.
What follows is a walkthrough I would give if I were sitting next to you at your desk, screen-sharing, coffee in hand. Five steps. Twenty minutes, if you do not get distracted. By the end you will have a clearer picture of your closest competitor than ninety percent of business owners ever bother to assemble about their own market.
Open a fresh browser tab. We begin.
Step 1: Count how many pages they have indexed in Google
Type this into Google, replacing the domain with your competitor's:
site:competitor.com
Press enter. At the top of the results page, Google will show you an approximate count — something along the lines of "About 247 results."
What it tells you. This is the number of pages from that website that Google has actually indexed — not the number of pages they have on their site, but the number Google considers worth keeping in its database. It is, in a real sense, the size of their visible footprint in search.
What good looks like. There is no single magic number, because it depends entirely on the type of business. A local plumber with twelve indexed pages may be doing everything right. A national e-commerce store with twelve indexed pages is in serious trouble. The question is not the absolute count — it is the comparison. Run site:yourdomain.com immediately afterwards. If your competitor has three hundred pages indexed and you have twenty-eight, that tells you something concrete: they have invested in content, you have not. If they have eighteen and you have three hundred, the opposite is true.
What to do about it. If they have substantially more indexed pages, click through the first few result pages and notice what kind of pages they are. Service pages for specific cities? Blog posts answering customer questions? Case studies? Whatever pattern you see, that is the content surface area they are competing on — and the one you will need to match or exceed if you want the same visibility. The companion piece why your competitors are ranking higher than you goes deeper on diagnosing this gap.
Step 2: View the homepage source and look for schema markup
This sounds technical. It is not. On the competitor's homepage, right-click anywhere that is not an image or a link, and choose "View Page Source." A new tab opens, full of code that looks intimidating but which you do not have to read.
Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) to open the search bar inside that page of source code. Search for two specific terms, one at a time:
LocalBusinessFAQPage
What it tells you. These are pieces of "schema markup" — small invitations a website places in its code to tell Google, ChatGPT, and other engines exactly what kind of business it is and what it does. LocalBusiness tells search engines: "I am a business with a physical presence in a specific place, here is my address, my hours, my phone number." FAQPage tells them: "Here are questions my customers ask, with my answers — feel free to surface them."
Both are absolutely fundamental for local visibility and for being cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. A site without them is, in effect, whispering at a search engine that prefers to listen to those who speak clearly.
What good looks like. If the search returns a match for either term — meaning the word appears somewhere in the code — your competitor has at least attempted schema markup. If both come up empty, they have not. Now go and check your own homepage the same way. The truth is, in my experience, perhaps one in three small business websites has proper schema in place. The rest are leaving signals on the table.
What to do about it. If your competitor has schema and you do not, this is one of the highest-leverage fixes available to you. It is not visible to visitors, it does not require redesigning anything, and it materially improves how search engines and AI systems understand your business. Most modern website platforms (Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress with the right plugin) can add it in under an hour with the right guidance.
Step 3: Inspect their Google Business Profile
Go back to Google and search for the competitor's business name plus their city. Their Google Business Profile should appear on the right side of the results (on desktop) or near the top (on mobile). The little knowledge panel with the photos, the hours, the reviews.
Note three things:
- The total number of reviews
- The date of the most recent review
- Whether they are actively posting "Updates" — those little news-style posts that some businesses publish through their profile
What it tells you. The Google Business Profile is, for local businesses, more important than the website itself. It is the single object that Google Maps, Google Search, and increasingly AI assistants use to decide whether to recommend you. The review count, the freshness of those reviews, and the posting cadence are all signals of an active, trusted, alive business.
What good looks like. Recent reviews — within the last thirty days, ideally within the last week — matter more than the absolute total. A business with three hundred reviews where the most recent is from eight months ago looks dormant. A business with sixty reviews where the most recent is from yesterday looks vibrant. Active posting (a couple of Updates a month) is rare among small businesses and represents a meaningful edge for those who do it.
What to do about it. If your competitor is generating fresh reviews and you are not, the problem is almost never that your customers are unwilling — it is that you are not asking. Build a simple habit: every satisfied customer gets a personal request, with a direct link to your review form, within forty-eight hours of the job being done. The posts are even easier: a photo of recent work, two sentences of context, published once a week. It is not glamorous, but it is precisely the kind of consistent signal that compounds.
Step 4: Ask ChatGPT about your industry — and see who it names
This is the step that most owners have never thought to run, and it is the one that reveals the most about where the market is moving.
Open ChatGPT (the free version is fine) and type a query that a real customer might type. Something like:
Best [your service] in [your city]
Or:
I need a [specific problem] solved — who do you recommend in [city]?
Read the answer carefully. ChatGPT will, in most cases, name specific businesses. Note whether your competitor appears. Note whether you appear. Note who else is named that you did not expect.
What it tells you. A growing share of customers are no longer searching Google in the traditional sense — they are asking AI assistants, and acting on the recommendations they receive. The businesses ChatGPT names for your category are, in effect, the new front page of search for that growing audience. If your competitor is being recommended and you are not, that is a channel you are losing without even knowing the game is being played.
What good looks like. Being named at all is the threshold. Being named first, or with specific positive context ("highly reviewed," "specializes in X"), is the higher tier. If neither of you appears, the AI is recommending businesses that have done something specific to earn that visibility — and it is worth examining who those names are.
What to do about it. AI search optimization (often called GEO) is a distinct discipline from traditional SEO, but it builds on the same foundations: clear schema, fresh reviews, content that directly answers customer questions, presence across multiple directories rather than just Google. The earlier work — steps 2 and 3 — feeds directly into this. To see this gap quantified rather than guessed, a manual side-by-side check of where you stand against your competitors is the natural next move.
Step 5: Check the publish date on their most recent blog post
Navigate to your competitor's blog, if they have one. Look at the most recent post. Note the date.
What it tells you. Content freshness is one of the simplest and most overlooked signals of a business that is still investing in its visibility. A blog with a most-recent post from three years ago tells a search engine — and tells a careful human visitor — that nobody at this company is paying attention. A blog with a post from last week tells the opposite story.
What good looks like. For a small local business, one well-written post per month is genuinely sufficient. For a more competitive market, two per month is meaningful. The question is rarely whether they are publishing twenty posts a month — almost no small business does — but whether they are publishing at all, with any consistency. A regular drumbeat of even modest content beats a sporadic flurry of polished pieces.
What to do about it. If your competitor has no blog, or an abandoned one, this is an open door. Start with the questions your customers actually ask you on the phone — those are, almost without exception, the same questions other customers are typing into Google and ChatGPT. Each answer is a post. There is no need to invent topics. The market has already told you what to write.
How to interpret what you have just found
You now have five data points about one competitor. Lay them out side by side with the same five for your own business:
- Indexed pages
- Schema markup present (yes / no)
- Google review recency and posting cadence
- Whether ChatGPT names you for your category
- Most recent blog post date
The pattern that emerges is almost always more interesting than any single number. You will typically find that the competitor who frustrates you is not better at everything — they are better at two or three specific things, and worse at others. Naturally, those two or three things are the ones generating the asymmetric result you have been observing.
This is liberating, because it converts a vague unease ("they are doing better than us") into a specific plan ("they have schema and active reviews; we need both, in that order").
What to do next
Take the single largest gap and address it this week. Not all five — one. Schema is usually the fastest win because it is invisible to customers and can be implemented without disrupting anything. Reviews are the slowest to compound but the most durable. Content sits in the middle: meaningful within a quarter, transformative within a year.
If you want to go deeper on the same DIY spirit, the under-an-hour audit of your own site pairs naturally with this competitor exercise — one looks outward, the other inward.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to audit a competitor's website like this? Yes, completely. Every step described here uses publicly available information that the competitor has chosen to publish on the open web. There is no scraping, no login, no hacking — only careful observation of what is already visible to anyone who looks.
How often should I run this audit? Once a quarter is sufficient for most local businesses. Once a month if you are in an actively competitive market or are running a deliberate growth push. More frequent than that and you will mostly be watching paint dry.
What if I have more than one serious competitor? Run the five steps for each one, keep the answers in a simple spreadsheet, and look for patterns across competitors rather than per competitor. If three out of four have schema and you do not, that is a market-level signal — not a one-off difference.
Does this replace a professional SEO audit? No, and it is not meant to. A professional audit goes considerably deeper: crawl analysis, backlink profiles, Core Web Vitals, technical issues that this walkthrough does not touch. But the five steps above will catch the obvious gaps that account for most of the visible competitive difference, and they will tell you whether a deeper audit is worth commissioning.
What if my competitor scores better on every step? Then you have learned something genuinely useful: the gap is real, it is systemic, and closing it will take a sustained programme rather than a single fix. Pick the cheapest of the five gaps to address first, build momentum, and revisit the audit in ninety days.
Or compare yourself to your competitors automatically — paste two domains at licheo.com/seo-standings. Sixty seconds, no email required.