--- title: Find the search keywords your competitors pay for description: See which Google searches your competitors buy ads on, how many people search each one, and what a click costs, then turn the keywords worth paying for into a budget and campaigns your team can launch. slug: /use-cases/competitor-ppc-keywords page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I find the search keywords my competitors pay for with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent find the search keywords my competitors pay for? - What keywords are my competitors bidding on in Google Ads? - How can I see my competitors' paid search keywords, search volume, and cost per click? - What's the best way to do competitor keyword research for paid search? - Which paid keywords are worth bidding on before I launch Google Ads? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-10-23' date_modified: '2026-10-23' related_integrations: - /integrations/dataforseo.md - /integrations/semrush.md - /integrations/google-ads.md --- # Find the search keywords your competitors pay for ## Key Takeaways - Nobody outside Google can see exactly what a competitor bids, but search data tools record which ads appear for millions of searches, so you can see the keywords where each competitor's ads show up, how many people search them, and what a click usually costs. - The most useful keywords on a competitor's list are the ones they've paid for month after month, because advertisers tend to stop paying for searches that don't bring them customers. - Kite finds the competitors who actually advertise on your searches, pulls their paid keywords with search volume and cost per click, and cuts the list down to the searches that suit your buyers and your budget. - Before you spend anything, Kite works out what the shortlist would cost per click, per lead, and per month, so you can set a Google Ads budget from real numbers. - Kite then prepares the keyword groups, ad copy, and landing pages for your first campaigns, and your team launches them in Google Ads. ## How do you find the keywords your competitors bid on? When you're about to start Google search ads, your competitors have already done some expensive research for you. Every keyword they keep paying for is a search they believe brings them customers. Knowing those keywords, along with how many people search them and what each click costs, lets you set a budget from evidence instead of a guess. There are a few ways to see this information: - **Search Google yourself.** Type the searches your buyers would use and note which companies' ads appear above the results. This is free and accurate, but it only covers the searches you think to try. - **Look up a company's ads.** Google's Ads Transparency Center shows the ads a company has run. It shows the ad text, but not the keywords that triggered each ad. - **Check Auction Insights in your own account.** Once you're running Google Ads, Auction Insights shows which other advertisers compete in the same auctions as your keywords. It doesn't show their other keywords, and it only works after you've started spending. - **Use a competitive search data tool.** Semrush, SpyFu, and DataForSEO run huge numbers of Google searches and record which ads appear. From that record, they estimate the keywords each domain advertises on, along with search volume and cost per click. The last method is the only one that gives you a competitor's whole paid keyword list, and it's where most of the real work begins. A raw list from a competitor can run to hundreds or thousands of keywords. Some will be searches your buyers never type, some will be your competitor's brand name, and some will cost far more per click than a new campaign can afford. Turning that list into a short set of keywords worth paying for takes judgment about your buyers, your margins, and your website. That's work an AI agent is well suited to. It can pull the data for several competitors at once, check each keyword against what it knows about your customers, and do the cost math before you commit a dollar. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it handles competitor keyword research for paid search. ## How Kite finds the keywords your competitors pay for Kite starts with what it already knows about your business from its research: your products, your customers, your pricing, and the competitors you sell against. It uses that to find which competitors actually advertise on the searches your buyers make, and it pulls each one's paid keywords with search volume and cost per click from its built-in search data. Then Kite does the part a spreadsheet can't. It sorts the keywords by how closely they match what your buyers want, how long competitors have kept paying for them, and whether the click cost makes sense for what a customer is worth to you. You get a short list of keywords with the numbers behind each one, an estimate of what they would cost to run, and the campaign pieces you need to launch: keyword groups, ad copy, and landing pages that match. After your campaigns go live, Kite can repeat the check on a schedule so you see when a competitor starts or stops paying for a search you care about. ### Find the competitors who actually advertise on your searches The companies you think of as competitors aren't always the ones bidding against you in Google. Kite starts by checking who actually shows up. It runs live Google searches for the keywords that matter most to your business and records which companies' ads appear above the results, in the order Google showed them. It also checks which domains compete with yours in search results for the same keywords. Kite's built-in ad intelligence adds a view of each competitor's Google advertising. It shows how many keywords a competitor advertises on and an estimate of their monthly ad budget, along with the text of their current Google ads and the pages those ads send people to. That often changes the list. A large competitor might have no paid search at all, while a smaller company you rarely see in deals turns out to buy ads on every search in your category. Kite shows you who it found and why, and you can add or remove competitors before it goes further. ### Pull each competitor's paid keywords with search volume and cost per click For each competitor on the agreed list, Kite pulls the keywords where that competitor's ads appear in Google. Each keyword comes with the numbers you need to judge it: - how many people search for it each month - the typical cost per click advertisers pay - how competitive the bidding is - what the searcher is most likely trying to do, such as compare products or buy one - how its search volume has changed over the past year Kite then lines the competitors up side by side. A keyword that three competitors all pay for tells you something different from one that only a single competitor buys. When the same search appears on every list, the whole category has decided it's worth paying for. If you connect your Semrush account, Kite can also read up to twelve months of each competitor's ad history. That shows which keywords a competitor has paid for steadily and which ones they tried for a few weeks and dropped. ### Separate the keywords worth paying for from the ones that aren't A competitor's paid keyword list is evidence of what they think works. It isn't a shopping list for you. Kite goes through the combined list and decides which keywords deserve your budget, using four questions. First, does the searcher want what you sell? Kite checks each keyword against your products and your customers, so a search like "free bookkeeping template" doesn't make the list for a company selling paid bookkeeping software. Second, has a competitor kept paying for it? Advertisers usually stop paying for searches that don't bring them customers, so a keyword a competitor has bought for many months carries more weight than a large keyword they just started testing. Third, do you already rank for it? Kite checks your own search rankings for each keyword. If your page already sits near the top of the free results, a paid ad may buy visits you would have gotten anyway, and Kite says so. Fourth, can you afford it? A keyword that costs $40 a click can be a good deal for a company with large contracts and a bad one for a company selling a $20 subscription. Kite compares the cost per click with what a customer is worth to you. Kite also sets aside the keywords that are other companies' brand names. Bidding on a competitor's name is a separate decision with its own tradeoffs, so Kite lists those separately instead of mixing them into the main shortlist. ### Work out what the shortlist would cost before you set a budget Once the shortlist is ready, Kite turns it into a budget estimate you can act on. It starts with the cost per click for each keyword and works forward to the numbers that matter for your business: what a lead would cost and how much you'd need to spend each month to learn anything useful. Here's a simple example. Say a keyword costs $6 a click and about one visitor in 25 from a matching landing page signs up. Each signup would cost about $150. If a new customer is worth $2,000 to you, that keyword is worth testing. If a new customer is worth $100, it isn't, however many competitors pay for it. Kite uses your own numbers where it has them, such as your pricing from its research and your website's conversion rate from Kite's analytics on a site it hosts or from your connected analytics product. Where it has to assume something, it tells you what it assumed. If you connect your Google Ads account, Kite can generate keyword ideas through it and compare its estimates with what your own campaigns actually pay. ### Turn the shortlist into campaigns your team can launch Kite prepares the pieces of your first campaigns so your team can launch them quickly. It groups the shortlisted keywords by what the searcher wants, so each group can have its own ads and its own landing page. It also lists the searches your ads should avoid, called negative keywords, such as "jobs," "free," or "login," based on what it saw competitors attract. For each group, Kite writes a batch of Google responsive search ads. Each line comes from real evidence, such as your customers' words in reviews and testimonials, and Kite checks every line against Google's character limits. It reads competitors' current ads first, so your ads can make a point theirs don't. An ad works best when the page it sends people to matches the search. Kite can build a landing page for each keyword group, either on a website Kite hosts or through your connected content system. It asks for your approval before any page goes live. Kite doesn't create or change campaigns inside Google Ads. Your team adds the keywords, ads, and budget in Google Ads, using the batch Kite prepared. ### Check the keywords again as competitors change Competitors change their paid search over time. They add keywords, drop the ones that stop working, and raise their budgets before a launch. Kite can repeat the competitor keyword check on a schedule you choose, such as the first Monday of each month, and show what changed since the last run. Kite might report that a competitor started advertising on two of your shortlisted keywords, or that another dropped a keyword it had paid for all year. Each change comes with what it could mean for your campaigns and what Kite suggests doing about it. ## What you get - **A list of the competitors who advertise on your searches.** Each one comes with the searches where its ads appeared, how many keywords it advertises on, and an estimate of its monthly ad budget. - **Each competitor's paid keywords.** Every keyword shows monthly search volume, typical cost per click, how competitive the bidding is, what the searcher wants, and which competitors pay for it. - **A shortlist of keywords worth paying for.** Kite explains why each keyword made the list and why the rest were set aside, with competitors' brand names kept in their own group. - **A budget estimate.** Kite shows what the shortlist would cost per click, per lead, and per month, and names any assumptions it made. - **Campaign pieces ready to launch.** You get keyword groups, a list of negative keywords, a batch of checked ad copy for each group, and landing pages that match. - **A recurring check.** When you want it, Kite repeats the research on a schedule and reports what your competitors changed. ## How to get started Tell Kite what you want to know in plain language. You might ask, "Which keywords are our competitors paying for on Google?" or "We're about to start Google Ads. Which keywords should we bid on, and what would it cost?" Kite uses its research on your business to propose the competitors and searches to check, and it shows you that list first so you can change it. Then it comes back with the competitors' paid keywords, the shortlist, and the budget estimate. When you want the campaign pieces, Kite prepares them, and you approve each landing page before it goes live with the Approve button in the conversation or a reply, in the Kite web app or in Slack. You don't need to connect anything to start. Kite's built-in search data covers competitors' paid keywords, search volume, and cost per click without a separate account. Connect Semrush when you want a year of competitor ad history, and connect Google Ads when you want Kite to compare its estimates with your own account's costs and results. ## Integrations used to find your competitors' paid keywords Kite's built-in search data and ad intelligence cover the core research with no account of your own. You can connect Semrush for deeper competitor ad history and Google Ads to bring in your own account's data. ### Find competitors' paid keywords and their costs - [DataForSEO + Kite](/integrations/dataforseo.md): DataForSEO is built into Kite, so this research can start without a separate account. It supplies the keywords where each competitor's ads appear, along with search volume, cost per click, bidding competition, search intent, and your own rankings for the same keywords. ### Add a year of competitor ad history - [Semrush + Kite](/integrations/semrush.md): Connect your Semrush account to read each competitor's paid search keywords, the ad copy Semrush has recorded for them, and twelve months of their ad history. Kite can also compare up to five domains to find the paid keywords your competitors share and the ones you're missing. ### Compare the research with your own campaigns - [Google Ads + Kite](/integrations/google-ads.md): Connect your Google Ads account so Kite can generate keyword ideas through it and compare its estimates with what your campaigns actually pay, how they perform, and the Quality Scores Google gives your keywords. Kite reads the account, and your team makes the changes in Google Ads. ## Common questions ### Can I see exactly what my competitors bid on each keyword? No. Only Google and the advertiser know the exact bids. What you can see is where a competitor's ads appear and the typical cost per click advertisers pay for each keyword. That's enough to judge whether a keyword is affordable, because what you pay depends on your own bid, your ad's quality, and how strongly the other advertisers compete in each auction, so no single competitor's exact bid would tell you your price. The cost and budget figures Kite gives you are estimates, and once your campaigns are running and your Google Ads account is connected, Kite compares them with what you actually pay. ### Is there a free way to find competitors' paid keywords? Yes, but it's slower and less complete. You can search Google for your most important keywords and note which ads appear, look up a competitor's ads in Google's Ads Transparency Center, and use Google Keyword Planner for search volume and cost-per-click ranges. None of these gives you a competitor's full keyword list. With Kite, the competitor keyword research uses its built-in search data, so you don't need to buy a separate search data subscription to get the full list. ### Which keywords should I bid on before I launch Google Ads? Start with a small set of keywords where the searcher clearly wants a product like yours, where at least one competitor has paid steadily, and where the cost per click fits what a customer is worth to you. Searches that compare products or name your category with words like "software," "service," or "pricing" usually belong in that first set. Broad, expensive keywords can wait until you know your own conversion rate. Kite builds this first set for you and shows the reasoning behind each pick. ### Should I bid on my competitors' brand names? It depends on your category and your budget. Bidding on a competitor's name can reach buyers who are already comparing options, but those clicks can cost more and convert less, and trademark rules can limit how you use their name in your ad text. Kite lists competitors' brand-name keywords separately, with their volume and cost, so you can decide on purpose. If you do bid on them, a comparison page that explains how you differ usually works better than sending those visitors to your homepage. ### How accurate are the search volume and cost-per-click numbers? They're estimates built from large samples of Google searches, and they're best for comparing keywords with each other rather than predicting exact spend. Cost per click changes with the time of year, your location targeting, and how many advertisers are bidding that week. Kite treats the numbers as a starting point for the budget, then compares them with your actual costs once your campaigns are running.