Guides
How to see competitor keywords they actually rank for
One domain lookup in your market gives positions and estimated visits; reading their site only shows their plans.
The short answer: to see competitor keywords they actually rank for, enter the rival's domain into a keyword data tool and choose your country. You get back the searches where their pages show up in Google, each with a position and an estimated number of visits. Reading their site by hand only tells you what they are trying to rank for, which is a different and usually much longer list.
The rest of this page covers the details that change the answer.
The one-step version
On seogeoaeo.ai, the Competitor Keywords tool does this in one run. You paste the competitor's domain, or any URL on it, and pick a market such as the US, UK or Germany. It returns up to 100 keywords the whole domain ranks for, ordered by the visits each sends, with:
- the position their page holds
- monthly search volume
- difficulty
- search intent
- cost per click
- estimated visits
- the URL that ranks
It also sorts the list for you into blog topics and keywords worth bidding on, and names the pages bringing the site the most traffic. One run costs 35 credits.
Why "what they rank for" and "what they target" differ
A competitor's sitemap, title tags and headings show its plans. Its rankings show which of those plans worked. A company can publish pages aimed at hundreds of phrases and place well for only a small share of them. If you copy the plan, you inherit its misses as well as its wins. The ranking data shows you only the wins, along with how strong each one is.
Three things that change the numbers
The country. Keyword data is collected per market. A company that is big in Britain can look tiny when you check it against US results. Always pick the market where you compete.
The tool. Every provider builds its figures from its own sample of searches. Two tools will report different totals for the same site. Use the same one for every rival and compare rows against each other, not against a different tool's count.
Brand searches. The top of a competitor's list is often their own name, plus things like "login". Those are useless to you. Filter them out before you read anything else. The Competitor Keywords tool already leaves brand searches out of its blog topics list.
What the tool does not show
- Keywords for a single folder or page; it covers the whole domain.
- Rankings in other countries than the one you pick.
- Exact traffic. Visits and volumes are estimates from a search data provider, not from Google.
- The keywords a competitor bids on in Google Ads. Google does not publish those.
- Your own ranking history over time. For that, a rank tracker such as Semrush Position Tracking is the better fit.
Can I do it for free?
Partly. A free pass looks like this: open their sitemap.xml, read the titles and H1s on their main pages, run a site: search on Google for topics you care about, and look up their ads in Google's Ads Transparency Center. Google says a site: query does not return every URL, so treat it as a sample. This gives you their intentions. It will not give you positions or traffic.
seogeoaeo.ai itself has no free Competitor Keywords run. Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, which covers dozens of lookups at 35 credits each. Prices are listed on seogeoaeo.ai/pricing, and each tool shows its price before it runs.
What to do with the list
Sort by estimated visits, then look at position. Keywords where the competitor sits between 8 and 20 are not won yet. Keywords where they rank third with a thin page are better targets than ones where they rank first with an excellent guide. And if you want only the keywords they have and you lack, that is a keyword gap check, a separate tool.