How to Compare Competitors’ Websites

To compare competitors’ websites, start with the decision you need to make, then choose competitors and evidence that fit it. Separate direct business competitors from sites that compete for the same search queries. Compare the same geography, time period and traffic or device scope; inspect representative pages yourself; and treat third-party traffic and engagement figures as estimates or proxies. Finish with a short list of actions you can test on your own site.

This process answers questions such as “How does my site stack up against the competition in terms of organic traffic?” and “How does my website’s traffic, reach, and engagement compare to my best-in-class competitors?” Those are examples of questions used in Similarweb’s comparison guidance, not a promise that outside-in tools can reveal competitors’ actual business results. Similarweb’s search competition guidance and benchmarking guidance describe ways to frame these comparisons.

1. Decide what the comparison should help you do

Write down one decision before collecting data. A useful comparison for an SEO content plan may be unhelpful for evaluating market position or a visitor’s path to purchase. Match the evidence to the question instead of collecting every metric a tool offers.

Decision	Evidence to collect	What it can help you decide
Find organic search opportunities	Overlapping and missing keywords, organic visibility, search landing pages	Which topics or pages deserve research and prioritization
Understand acquisition	Traffic trends and channel distribution, using a consistent scope	Which acquisition channels appear more or less prominent
Improve a landing page	Page purpose, audience, offer, proof, format, navigation and calls to action	Which visitor-facing differences are worth testing
Assess market position	Direct and search competitor sets, region, trends and available market context	Whether your chosen comparison set represents the market question

For each metric, note the source, observation date, timeframe, geography, device or traffic type, and whether it is an estimate. This context is part of the result: without it, two numbers may not be comparable.

2. Choose competitors that match the question

Build separate lists for direct business competitors and search competitors. Direct competitors sell a similar product or service to a similar audience. Search competitors attract visitors from overlapping queries, even if they sell something else or provide another solution.

For example, Semrush describes a fitness gym’s search competitors as potentially including fitness apps, workout blogs and sports equipment stores. These sites may be useful to study for search visibility or content ideas without being direct commercial rivals. Use the Semrush Competitor Finder as one documented way to discover sites with overlapping keyword rankings.

List businesses your customers might realistically choose instead of you.
Identify sites that appear for your important non-brand and brand search queries.
Label each site as direct, search, or both, and record why it belongs.
Remove sites that do not answer the decision you wrote down.

Do not assume every high-traffic site is a useful competitor. A publisher, marketplace, directory or adjacent solution may be a search rival but offer little insight into your product positioning. Keep such sites in the search set only when their pages or visibility are relevant to your question.

3. Make the comparison fair

Use the same timeframe, geography, and traffic or device scope for each site. If you compare periods, keep their boundaries consistent and label seasonal periods or one-off campaigns rather than treating every movement as a durable trend.

Time: Compare the same dates or month ranges. Use more than one period when you need to distinguish a trend from a short-lived change.
Geography: Set the same country or region. Search results and traffic mix can differ across markets.
Device and traffic scope: Use matching filters where available, and record the selected scope.
Site scope: Confirm whether the tool is comparing a domain, subdomain, folder or page when that choice is available.
Competitor count: Some interfaces limit side-by-side comparisons. Similarweb describes up to four competitors in one workflow; that is a product-specific limit and may change. Check its current workflow documentation.

If you cannot align a filter across sites, mark the limitation and avoid drawing a precise ranking from the mismatched figures.

4. Compare visibility, acquisition and landing pages

Review traffic trends and channel distribution, then examine organic and paid search separately when the data supports it. For organic search, look for overlapping terms, relevant terms a competitor ranks for while your site is absent or weaker, and the landing pages that receive search traffic.

Keep brand and non-brand queries separate where possible. Brand demand and topic discovery answer different questions.
Review landing pages alongside keywords. A keyword gap is a research lead, not proof of a guaranteed ranking opportunity.
Check referring domains where the tool provides them, but treat the metric as context rather than a complete explanation of visibility.
Look at channel mix as well as total visits. Similar totals can come from different acquisition patterns.

Similarweb documents side-by-side website comparisons for visitation, engagement and SEO, while Semrush documents competitor research around overlapping keyword rankings, estimated organic traffic and pages. These are vendor-described capabilities, not an independent head-to-head evaluation of either service. Choose a tool based on the task: traffic and channel benchmarking, or keyword and page research. See Similarweb Compare and Semrush’s competitor-analysis features.

5. Inspect what visitors actually encounter

Traffic and keyword reports show only part of the picture. Visit a representative set of competitor pages on desktop and mobile. Include the pages that attract search traffic and the pages that represent the offer you want to understand.

For each page, record:

Who the page appears to address and the problem it promises to solve.
Its purpose, content format and main topic.
The offer, proof and calls to action presented to a visitor.
How navigation and page structure help visitors find the next step.
What changes between desktop and mobile presentation.
Whether cookie notices, popups or chat widgets obscure the page, and how they affect your observation.

Use a consistent observation sheet rather than an unstructured collection of screenshots. The Semrush competitor-analysis worksheet includes fields such as audience, tone, content campaigns, advertising, website metrics, traffic sources and traffic journey. Adapt its categories to your decision; you do not need to fill every field.

A repeatable page-capture workflow

Choose the same page types for each competitor, such as a homepage, category page and high-visibility article.
Record the page URL, date, device viewport and any visible consent or promotional overlays.
Capture the page at the same viewport for a visual side-by-side review. For long pages, use a full-page capture; for a specific component, capture that element if your browser tool supports it.
Compare the visitor’s path: page promise, supporting information, proof, navigation and next action.
Separate direct observations from explanations. “The CTA appears above the fold” is observable; “this is why the page converts” is a hypothesis.

Page captures help preserve what you observed, but they do not reveal the competitor’s conversion rate or prove why its traffic changed. Add the observation date and page URL to every saved capture.

6. Interpret engagement and traffic estimates carefully

Visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate can help describe how visitors interact with a site, but they are context-sensitive proxies, not direct measures of satisfaction or conversion. A short visit may be appropriate for a page that answers a simple question; a longer visit does not by itself prove that the experience is good.

Competitor analytics are outside-in estimates: you generally cannot inspect another company’s first-party analytics. Semrush labels monthly organic traffic as an estimate, and the reviewed vendor help pages describe workflows rather than independently validating the accuracy of traffic figures. Name the provider and date, describe values as directional estimates, and corroborate conclusions with public pages and search results. External estimates cannot establish a competitor’s actual revenue or conversion rate unless a separate source documents those outcomes.

For your own site, use first-party analytics and search reporting to assess actual outcomes. Compare your own results before and after a change; do not infer that a competitor’s visible feature caused its traffic difference.

7. Turn differences into a prioritized test list

A comparison is useful when it changes a decision. Convert each promising observation into a hypothesis you can evaluate on your own site. Do not copy competitor content; understand the visitor need behind the difference and develop an approach that fits your product and audience.

Observation	Evidence	Possible explanation	Action to evaluate	Measure on your site
A competitor’s guide attracts search visibility for a relevant topic	Search report, query and landing page	The page may answer an intent your site handles weakly	Research the intent and improve or create a distinct useful page	Your organic clicks, qualified visits or another defined outcome
A competitor explains its offer earlier on a landing page	Saved page capture and observation date	Visitors may need clearer positioning sooner	Test a clearer opening on a relevant page	Your chosen conversion or engagement outcome

Prioritize by relevance to the original decision, strength of evidence, effort and ability to measure the result. Keep the explanation marked as a hypothesis until your own data supports it.

Or skip the browser setup

If your comparison depends on repeatable page captures, ScreenshotNeo is a website screenshot API and MCP server for developers. Its API returns a screenshot or PDF from one GET request. The request below saves a WebP capture of a representative competitor page; use a page you are authorized to access and replace the target URL.

See the ScreenshotNeo API documentation for parameters and configuration.

cURL

curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webp

Python

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot",
    params={"access_key": "YOUR_API_KEY", "url": "https://stripe.com"},
    timeout=90,
)
open("shot.webp", "wb").write(r.content)

Node.js

const q = new URLSearchParams({ access_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY', url: 'https://stripe.com' });
const res = await fetch(`https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot?${q}`);
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`Screenshot request failed: ${res.status}`);
await Bun.write('shot.webp', new Uint8Array(await res.arrayBuffer()));

The Node.js example uses Bun’s file-writing API to save the returned bytes. In Node.js environments without Bun, write the response buffer with the built-in node:fs/promises module.

ScreenshotNeo accepts cookie or consent banners like a visitor and removes 60+ known consent platforms, newsletter popups and chat widgets before capture; each step can be turned off. Bot checks, CAPTCHAs, blank pages, timeouts, failed loads and cache hits cost nothing, and responses identify the page verdict and billing status in headers. Its MCP server provides take_screenshot, get_page_info and capture_pdf for Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients. The free plan includes 1,000 screenshots a month with no card; paid plans start at $5 for 3,000, and every feature is on every plan.

Common problems and how to fix them

Problem	Likely cause	Fix
The competitor list looks unrelated	Direct business rivals and search rivals have been mixed together	Separate the sets and state why each site belongs to the comparison.
One site appears to dominate traffic	Different regions, time windows, device scopes or site scopes may be in use	Align filters and confirm what domain or page scope is being measured.
A traffic number conflicts with what you see publicly	Third-party traffic is estimated and may use a different scope or method	Identify the provider and date, treat it as directional, and corroborate with search results and public pages.
A keyword gap seems like an easy win	Keyword overlap does not guarantee relevance, ranking potential or business value	Review the actual query and landing page, assess intent, then prioritize a test rather than assuming a ranking outcome.
Engagement metrics seem to contradict page quality	Duration, pages per visit and bounce rate are proxies whose meaning depends on the page’s job	Interpret them alongside page purpose and audience; use first-party outcome data for your own site.
Saved page captures are hard to compare	Pages were captured at different widths, dates or scroll states, or overlays changed what was visible	Use the same viewport and page type, record date and URL, and note consent or promotional overlays.
A competitor’s page changed after capture	Public websites and campaigns change over time	Keep the dated capture as evidence of what you observed, then recapture before acting on a current-page detail.

Performance, reliability and cost considerations

Keep the research set focused. Start with the competitors and pages that inform the decision. Expand only when a missing comparison could change your conclusion.
Use consistent snapshots. Viewport, date, page type and URL notes make visual comparisons easier to repeat and review.
Budget for uncertainty. Traffic and engagement estimates are useful for directional comparison, not audited totals. Avoid making a decision depend on a small apparent difference between estimates.
Separate tool costs from evidence quality. Similarweb and Semrush offer documented competitor research capabilities, but their product claims do not independently establish estimate accuracy. Choose based on whether you need traffic/channel benchmarking or keyword/page research.
Measure changes on your own site. Competitor observations generate hypotheses; first-party analytics and search reporting evaluate your results.

Frequently asked questions

How many competitor websites should I compare?

There is no universal number. Include enough sites to represent the decision, and keep direct competitors distinct from search competitors. A comparison interface may impose its own limit.

Can I find out how many sales a competitor gets?

Not from outside-in traffic and engagement estimates alone. Those do not reveal actual conversion rates or revenue unless an independent source documents those outcomes.

Should I copy a competitor’s best-performing page?

No. Use it to understand the audience need, format and visible approach, then create a useful page suited to your own product and measure its results.

Which tool should I use for competitor research?

Choose by task. Similarweb documents website traffic, channel, engagement and SEO comparisons; Semrush documents keyword-overlap discovery and competitor SEO research. Their feature descriptions are vendor claims, so treat estimates as directional.