Most SEO competitor analysis starts the same way. You list the companies you lose deals to, paste their domains into a tool, export the keyword gap and sort it by search volume. Then you spend a week writing about whatever sits at the top.
We ran that process on a real pair of companies to see where it goes wrong. We used Hiver, a help desk that works inside Gmail, and Help Scout, a better-known rival. Then we added a step most guides skip, which is checking who Google's AI Overviews cite on the searches that matter.
This is SEO competitor analysis as seven steps, each with what the data actually showed. All of it came from a commercial SEO data provider on October 19, 2026.
Step 1: Find your search competitors
Your business competitors and your search competitors are different lists. We asked our SEO data provider which domains share the most ranking keywords with Hiver.
| Domain | Keywords shared with Hiver |
|---|---|
| zendesk.com | 3,671 |
| hubspot.com | 3,386 |
| indeed.com | 2,988 |
| zapier.com | 2,264 |
| helpscout.com | 2,123 |
| microsoft.com | 1,993 |
| salesforce.com | 1,921 |
| mailmeteor.com | 1,862 |
Indeed is third. Hiver's blog covers broad topics like how to write an email, email etiquette and the difference between customer service and support, and Indeed's career guides cover the same ground. Microsoft overlaps on Outlook how-tos, such as recalling an email.
None of that makes Indeed a competitor worth studying. Pick three to five domains that compete with you for buying searches, and treat the rest as noise. For Hiver, Help Scout is a sensible choice, so that's who we compared next.
Step 2: Pull the keyword gap, then filter it hard
A keyword gap lists the searches a competitor ranks for that you don't. Help Scout ranked in the top 10 for 1,158 keywords where Hiver didn't rank at all.
Here's the top of that list when you sort by volume, the way most people do.
| Keyword | Monthly searches | Help Scout's position |
|---|---|---|
| ea nasir | 27,100 | 4 |
| color psychology | 9,900 | 3 |
| help scout | 8,100 | 1 |
| good customer service | 3,600 | 8 |
| hipaa compliant email providers | 3,600 | 7 |
The biggest gap is a blog post about Ea-nasir, the Babylonian copper merchant behind what's often called the oldest customer complaint. It's a fun piece of content. It has nothing to do with whether anyone buys a help desk.
The pattern holds across the list. Of the first 1,000 gap keywords, 837 were informational, 117 were navigational and only 46 were commercial or transactional. Those 46 accounted for about 2% of the gap's search volume.
Even the intent labels need checking. The keyword data tagged "ea nasir tablet" as commercial. Read the list yourself before trusting any filter.
Your competitors are building backlinks while you read this.
Organic outreach, social mentions, and citations from Editorial Circle member sites, with managed backlinks available as an add-on. Grow your domain authority without running the campaign yourself.
Step 3: Sort by value, not volume
Once you filter to buying searches and sort by cost per click, a different list appears. These were all in Help Scout's top 10 and absent for Hiver.
| Keyword | Monthly searches | Cost per click |
|---|---|---|
| live chat for ecommerce | 210 | $188.90 |
| artificial intelligence customer service companies | 90 | $338.10 |
| outsource customer service for small business | 70 | $110.11 |
| patient communication software | 110 | $43.14 |
| comparison of help desk software | 140 | $22.93 |
None of these would make the first page of a volume-sorted export. They're also exactly the searches where a buyer is choosing a tool.
Look at the pages behind them too. Help Scout ranks with an industry post on patient communication software and a guide to choosing help desk software. That tells Hiver which page types to build as well as which keywords to chase. Industry pages and buyer guides are doing the work here.
Step 4: Check who AI cites on those searches
This is the step most competitor analyses skip, and it changed the picture. We pulled the AI Overviews for the same buying searches.
| Search | Who ranked | Who the AI Overview cited |
|---|---|---|
| live chat for ecommerce | Help Scout at #8 | LiveChat, Zoho and EverHelp |
| patient communication software | Help Scout at #3 | PubNub, Patterson Dental and Phreesia |
| hiver alternatives | Hiver at #2, #4 and #7 | Five rivals, and not Hiver |
| help scout alternatives | Help Scout absent | Helpmonks, monday.com and doversus |
| shared inbox for gmail | Reddit at #1, Hiver absent | Reddit, Gmelius and Medium |
Ranking didn't mean being cited. Help Scout ranked third for patient communication software, and the AI Overview cited three other sites, one of which wasn't in the top nine at all.
The "hiver alternatives" result is the one to remember. Hiver held three of the top seven spots for its own alternatives search. The AI answer at the top cited five competitors and none of Hiver's pages.
Marketers are running into this from the other side too. A PR pro asked r/PublicRelations why ChatGPT names a client's competitor for topics the client should own, even with decent coverage and links. The most upvoted reply said the playbooks are still being written. Another reply pushed back on the idea that AI simply copies press coverage, noting that many news sites block AI tools, so paywalled articles often can't be read at all.
So your AI competitors are a third list. Our post on tracking competitor mentions in ChatGPT and Perplexity covers how to build that list across engines, and our guide to SaaS content marketing shows why Reddit takes so many alternatives citations.
Step 5: Compare links
Links still explain a lot of ranking gaps. Its backlink index counted about 29,000 referring domains for Help Scout and about 7,700 for Hiver.
You won't close a gap that size directly. The useful move is narrower. Find the sites that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you, because they've already shown they cover your category. Industry roundups, integration directories and software review lists usually top that list.
You're getting AI traffic. But do you know where it comes from?
RankControl credits every visit to the assistant that sent it: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok. Full source attribution, next to your Google traffic.
Step 6: Turn the gap into a page plan
A competitor analysis is only useful if it ends in a short list of pages. Here's what we'd hand Hiver's team from this exercise.
| Gap | Page to build |
|---|---|
| Industry searches like patient communication software | Industry pages for the sectors Hiver already serves |
| Comparison of help desk software | An honest comparison guide with a clear verdict per team type |
| Hiver alternatives, where AI cites rivals | A fair alternatives page, plus answers in the Reddit threads buyers read |
| Shared inbox for Gmail, where Reddit ranks first | A plain guide to shared inboxes in Gmail, with setup steps and screenshots |
Notice what's not on the list. Nothing about ancient Babylon, color psychology or customer service quotes, even though those were the biggest gaps by volume.
A reply in r/content_marketing described a good sanity check for each item. Search the question yourself and look at what ranks. If the existing answers are outdated, generic or miss what people actually ask, that's a gap worth filling.
Step 7: Monitor instead of re-running it
A full competitor analysis is a snapshot. A post in r/SEOcompetitors this month argued that monitoring beats analysis, and the AI results back that up. AI answers change week to week, so a citation check from October may not hold in December.
Run the full analysis once or twice a year. In between, check your ten most important buying searches every month for rankings and AI citations, and note which competitors appear. Our post on AI share of voice covers how to turn those checks into one number.
Doing it without a paid tool
You can run a lighter version for free. If you do want a paid tool, our comparison of the best SEO competitor analysis tools covers prices and features. Search Console shows the searches you already appear for, so start there and note the competitors that keep ranking above you on your best pages. Then search your ten most important buying questions by hand, in a private window, and write down who ranks and who the AI Overview cites.
That won't give you a 1,158-keyword gap list, and honestly you won't miss most of it. The steps that changed the plan in our example, filtering to buying searches and checking AI citations, are the ones you can do by hand. Our post on checking competitor traffic covers the free traffic estimates if you want those too.
What this costs in hours
The analysis above takes about a day with a paid SEO tool. Finding search competitors and pulling the gap takes an hour, filtering and reading the list takes three or four, and checking AI citations and links takes another two or three. Monthly monitoring adds two hours a month.
You can do all of this by hand. Or RankControl can do the ongoing part for you, tracking which competitors ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Google AI Mode cite for your buying questions each week, and writing the pages that close the gaps, while you focus on your product.
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