Ask most businesses who their competitors are and they'll give you an answer immediately.
The company across town.
The national operator taking market share.
The new entrant everyone is talking about.
The brand their sales team keeps encountering.
Then look at Google.
Very often, the businesses actually competing for their customers' attention are completely different.
Publishers.
Comparison websites.
Directories.
Marketplaces.
Affiliates.
Reddit threads.
YouTube videos.
Government websites.
Industry publications.
And increasingly, Google and AI platforms themselves.
This creates one of the most common mistakes we see in SEO strategy.
Businesses build their search strategy around the companies they compete against commercially.
But search doesn't organise the world according to your competitor list.
It organises results around what users appear to want.
And those are two very different things.
Commercial Competitors And Search Competitors Are Different
Imagine two property businesses operating within the same region.
Commercially, they're obvious competitors.
They offer similar services to similar customers in similar locations.
But search for one of their most valuable topics and neither company may dominate the results.
Instead, you might find:
- Rightmove
- Zoopla
- local publications
- government resources
- national newspapers
- specialist property websites
The commercial competition hasn't disappeared.
But the search competition is entirely different.
This matters because an SEO strategy built solely around outranking the business next door may completely misunderstand the environment you're actually competing within.
Google Doesn't Care About Your Competitor List
Search engines aren't trying to decide which company deserves the biggest market share.
They're trying to satisfy intent.
Sometimes the best response to a search is a commercial page.
Sometimes it's a guide.
Sometimes it's a video.
Sometimes it's a map.
Sometimes it's a forum discussion.
Sometimes it's an answer displayed directly within the search results.
This means your competition changes from query to query.
For one search, you might compete against another business.
For another, you're competing against Wikipedia.
For another, Reddit.
For another, Google itself.
That is why SERP analysis remains so important.
Before asking:
How do we outrank our competitors?
We need to understand:
What kind of result is actually winning?
The SERP Tells You What Google Thinks The User Wants
This sounds obvious.
It is surprisingly easy to ignore.
If Google predominantly returns informational articles for a query, attempting to rank a highly commercial service page may be an uphill battle.
If the results are dominated by local businesses and map listings, another 2,000-word article probably isn't the answer.
If video results dominate, producing more written content may miss the point entirely.
The shape of the search result tells us something about intent.
Not perfectly.
But enough to influence strategy.
This is one reason we don't like SEO strategies built entirely inside keyword tools.
Keywords provide useful data.
Search results provide context.
And context is where the interesting decisions begin.
Sometimes You Shouldn't Compete At All
This is where SEO becomes more strategic.
Not every search result needs to be conquered.
There are queries where competing directly makes enormous commercial sense.
There are others where the investment required would be difficult to justify.
Imagine a relatively specialist business trying to displace enormous publishers from an informational query with limited commercial intent.
Could it eventually rank?
Possibly.
Should it spend twelve months trying?
That's a different question.
Good SEO isn't simply identifying where rankings are possible.
It is deciding where rankings are worth pursuing.
Sometimes the smarter move is to target a different part of the journey entirely.
Your Competitors Can Also Become Your Distribution
This becomes particularly interesting with publishers, affiliates and comparison websites.
A traditional SEO mindset views every website above you as competition.
A broader acquisition mindset asks whether some of them could actually become distribution channels.
If a comparison website dominates an important search, perhaps appearing prominently on that platform is more commercially useful than trying to outrank it.
If an industry publication consistently appears for research-led queries, earning coverage there may strengthen both referral traffic and brand authority.
If Reddit conversations repeatedly influence a particular buying journey, understanding what customers are discussing there may be more useful than creating another generic landing page.
Competition and distribution aren't always opposites.
Sometimes the website occupying the search result you want is also one of the best routes into that audience.
AI Search Makes The Competitive Landscape Even Stranger
AI-driven search makes this considerably more complex.
When a user asks an AI platform for a recommendation, there may be no traditional ranking position to compete for.
The system may synthesise information from multiple sources before presenting a handful of brands.
That means businesses increasingly compete for:
- recognition
- association
- citations
- mentions
- authority
- and inclusion
rather than simply position one.
Your website remains important.
But so does the information surrounding your brand elsewhere.
The competitive landscape is becoming an ecosystem rather than a leaderboard.
Search Features Are Competitors Too
One of the least comfortable realities of modern SEO is that Google increasingly satisfies searches without requiring users to leave Google.
Maps.
Featured snippets.
Shopping results.
Knowledge panels.
AI-generated answers.
People Also Ask.
Video carousels.
All of these compete for attention.
So a business can technically rank first organically and still receive less attention than it might have several years ago.
This doesn't make SEO less valuable.
It changes what successful SEO looks like.
Visibility needs to be considered across the whole search experience rather than through rankings alone.
Competitor Research Should Start With The Customer
This is why our competitor research doesn't simply begin with a list supplied by the client.
We look at what customers actually encounter.
Search the important questions.
Search the commercial terms.
Search the problems.
Search the brand comparisons.
Look at who appears.
Look at what format appears.
Look at which brands keep resurfacing.
Very quickly, a different competitive landscape begins to emerge.
And sometimes the businesses a client was most worried about barely feature.
The Real Competition Is For Attention
Ultimately, SEO isn't really a competition for rankings.
It's a competition for attention at the moment somebody needs something.
That attention can be captured by:
a competitor,
a publisher,
a marketplace,
a review platform,
a social network,
an AI answer,
or your own brand.
Understanding that makes SEO considerably more interesting.
Because once you stop assuming that your commercial competitors are also your search competitors, you start seeing opportunities that conventional competitor analysis completely misses.
And very often, that's where the best strategy begins.
If you'd like to discuss how we work, we'd love to hear from you.
Get In Touch