--- title: Track competitors' search rankings description: Find the sites that actually compete with you in Google, see which searches and pages win them traffic, follow how their rankings move week to week, and publish the pages that win those searches back. slug: /use-cases/competitor-rank-tracking page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I track competitors' search rankings with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent track competitors' search rankings? - Who are my competitors in Google search results? - How do I monitor competitor keyword rankings? - How do I find out which competitors outrank me? - How do I do an SEO competitor analysis? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-11-02' date_modified: '2026-11-02' related_integrations: - /integrations/dataforseo.md - /integrations/semrush.md - /integrations/ahrefs.md related_playbooks: - /how-to/compare-ai-mentions-search-performance-and-competitors-with-search-console-semrush.md --- # Track competitors' search rankings ## Key Takeaways - Your competitors in Google are the sites that rank beside you for the searches your buyers make, and they're often not the companies your sales team names. Kite finds them by checking who ranks next to you for your 25 highest-traffic searches, then removes platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and G2 that rank beside everyone. - For each competitor you confirm, Kite reads the keywords it ranks for in Google's top 100, the page behind each ranking, its position, and the visitors that position is likely to bring. It also shows which of its pages earn the most search traffic. - Kite follows how those rankings move. Each read shows whether a competitor's position is new, up, or down and where it was before, and Kite can show a competitor's search traffic month by month over the last year. - A weekly competitor check compares each competitor with what Kite recorded last time and reports only the changes that matter, such as a new page that's climbing for one of your searches. - Kite turns what it finds into work. It sorts out the searches where competitors win and you're absent, writes or improves the page for each one, publishes it once you approve, and then tracks your position on that search every week. ## Why tracking competitors' search rankings matters Many teams lose search traffic to companies they've never thought of as competitors. You know the three rivals that show up in sales calls. You probably don't know that a niche blog, a software directory, and a company in a neighboring category are the ones taking the clicks on your most valuable searches. That happens because search competition is decided by the search, not by the product. Any site that ranks for "how to schedule shifts for a small restaurant" competes with you for that buyer's attention, whether or not it sells what you sell. So the useful list of search competitors starts from the searches you care about and works back to the sites that rank for them. Tracking those competitors takes a few kinds of work: - finding the sites that actually rank beside you - seeing which searches and pages bring them traffic - noticing when their rankings move - deciding what to publish in response Rank-tracking tools handle the data well. Reading it every week, spotting the change that matters, and turning it into a better page still falls to someone on your team. That's the kind of work an AI agent handles well, because it can pull the same data on a schedule, compare it with last time, and connect a competitor's gain to the page that caused it. 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 tracks your competitors in search and acts on what it finds. ## How Kite tracks competitors' search rankings Kite starts with research it has already done. When your team signs up, Kite checks your search rankings and researches your competitors as part of learning your business. That gives it the searches your site already ranks for, which are the starting point for finding who you compete with in Google. From there, Kite works in a loop. It finds the sites that rank beside you and asks you to confirm which ones are real competitors. Then it reads what each one ranks for, picks out the searches where they win and you don't, and writes the pages to close those gaps. Each week it checks how your competitors' rankings and your own have moved, and it brings back what changed along with the next move it recommends. Kite's search data is built in, so all of this works without an SEO tool of your own. Its built-in rankings come from Google's results for searches made in the United States in English. If your team already uses Semrush, Kite can read your Semrush account as well. ### Who are your competitors in Google search results? Your search competitors are the domains that rank for the same searches you do, and Kite finds them from your own rankings. It takes the 25 searches that bring your site the most estimated traffic and asks which other domains rank in Google's results for those same searches. A domain has to share at least two of those searches to count. That raw list needs cleaning, because some sites rank beside every company and compete with none. Kite removes the big platforms, such as: - social networks like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook - forums and reference sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia - marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy - review sites and directories like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot Kite also removes sites that only share your name. Say your company is a scheduling product called Juniper. A garden nursery might rank beside you for the search "juniper," but it isn't competing for your buyers. Kite recognizes searches for your brand name and leaves them out, then ranks the remaining domains by how many of your other searches they share. Kite shows you two lists and keeps them apart. The first is the search competitors it measured. The second is companies Kite suggests from what it knows about your business, which it hasn't measured in search yet. You confirm the ones that are real competitors and mark the rest as not competitors, and Kite remembers that choice so a rejected domain doesn't come back. You can also name a competitor yourself and ask Kite to check which searches it wins. ### How do you find out which competitors outrank you? Kite reads each confirmed competitor's rankings and lines them up with yours. For any domain, its built-in search data lists the keywords that domain ranks for in Google's top 100 results. For each keyword, Kite gets: - the competitor's page that ranks and its position - the monthly search volume and how hard the keyword is to rank for - the estimated visitors that position brings each month - whether Google shows an AI Overview or a featured snippet for the search Kite adds up those estimated visitors page by page, which shows the handful of pages that earn a competitor most of its search traffic. That's often the most useful finding. A competitor might rank for 3,000 keywords, but if one comparison page and two guides bring in most of its visitors, those three pages are what you're really up against. Kite then sorts the shared searches by where you stand. Where a competitor ranks in the top 20 and your site doesn't appear at all, you have a gap. Where you both rank but the competitor sits above you, Kite reads both pages to work out what the competitor's page answers that yours doesn't. Kite leaves out searches with fewer than 100 monthly searches, because there's too little traffic in them to justify the work. If you connect Semrush, Kite can compare your domain with up to four competitors at once. Semrush sorts the keywords into the ones you all share, the ones only you hold, and the ones your competitors rank for while you don't. **Related Playbooks** - [How to compare AI mentions, search performance, and competitors with Search Console and Semrush](/how-to/compare-ai-mentions-search-performance-and-competitors-with-search-console-semrush.md): Put your own Google clicks and rankings next to your competitors' Semrush rankings and your AI-answer visibility, so you can see where a competitor wins in search, in AI answers, or both. ### How do you monitor competitor keyword rankings over time? Kite follows competitors' rankings in three ways: what changed since the last read, the longer monthly trend, and a weekly check that reports only the changes that matter. Every time Kite reads a competitor's rankings, each keyword comes with its previous position and whether it's new, up, or down. So a single read already shows movement. If a competitor's pricing page went from position 14 to position 3 for "restaurant scheduling software," you see both numbers side by side. For the longer view, Kite reads a domain's estimated search traffic month by month over the last year and tells you whether it's rising, flat, or falling. Say two competitors look equally strong today, but one has doubled its search traffic since spring while the other has slipped by a third. The first one is investing in content, and it's the one to watch. For ongoing tracking, ask Kite to run a weekly competitor check. Each run compares every competitor with what Kite recorded the last time and saves the new state in your team's knowledge base for next week. Kite reports a change only when it could affect your positioning or your content plan, such as a new page climbing for one of your important searches or a competitor starting a push on a topic you cover. Small day-to-day shuffles update the record without cluttering the report. Each finding comes with the competitor, what changed, when, a link to the evidence, why it matters, and a suggested response. The results go where your team works. With Slack, they post to the channel you choose. Without it, Kite emails them to the person who set up the check, or keeps each run as a conversation in the Kite web app. ### Decide what to publish in response A competitor's ranking only matters when it leads to a decision about your own site, so Kite turns each finding into a specific move. For each search worth pursuing, Kite proposes one of three things: - **Create a new page** when a competitor wins a search your site doesn't cover. - **Write a guide** when the search is a question that a thorough article answers best. - **Improve an existing page** when you already rank but sit below a competitor. Kite checks the searches and pages of up to three confirmed competitors at a time to find these openings. It buys fresh search data for any competitor it last checked more than a week ago, so the openings reflect current rankings. Kite also brings up a few ideas that none of your competitors cover yet. It labels those separately, because no ranking data backs them, and suggests talking them through before anyone writes. ### Publish the pages and track the result Kite writes the pages it recommends using what it knows about your products, customers, positioning, and brand voice. Before it writes, it reads the competitor pages that currently rank so it knows what a winning answer has to cover. Kite shows you each page before it goes live. On a website Kite hosts, it publishes the page once you approve it. If your site runs on Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, or Storyblok, Kite publishes through your connected content system. The searches Kite chose become your site's tracked keywords, and Kite reads your position on each one every week. It can also set a ranking alert that tells you when one of them drops by a set number of places or falls off the first page. Next to your weekly competitor check, that shows whether your new page is taking the search back and whether a competitor is answering with a new page of its own. ## What you get - **A verified list of search competitors.** The domains that rank beside you for your most valuable searches, with platforms and name-alike sites removed, and kept apart from competitors Kite suggests from your business. - **Each competitor's rankings.** The keywords it ranks for in Google's top 100, with the ranking page, position, search volume, estimated visitors, and whether each position is new, up, or down. - **The pages that win them traffic.** Each competitor's pages ranked by the search traffic they're likely to bring. - **A list of gaps and openings.** The searches where a competitor ranks and you don't, and the searches where it outranks you, each with the page Kite proposes to create or improve. - **A weekly competitor check.** A short report of the material changes since last week, with evidence and a suggested response. - **The work itself.** New and improved pages, published once you approve them, then tracked every week. ## How to get started Get started for free and ask Kite in plain language. You might say, "Who are our competitors in Google, and which searches are they winning?" or "Check every week how our three main search competitors are moving, and tell me when one of them starts beating us on a search we care about." Kite already has your rankings from its research on your business, so it can find your search competitors right away with its built-in search data. It shows you the list and asks you to confirm the real competitors before it analyzes them. Then it brings back the searches each one wins and the pages it proposes for your site. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. In the Kite web app, Kite can show competitor rankings as a table or chart right in the conversation. You don't need to connect anything for the first analysis. Connect Semrush if your team already plans around its numbers, and connect Ahrefs if you want Kite to study the backlinks behind your competitors' rankings. Kite asks before it publishes any page, and once you trust its judgment, you can let it handle more of that on its own. ## Integrations used to track competitors' search rankings Kite's search data is built in, so it can find your competitors and read their rankings without an account of your own. The SEO tools your team already uses can add their numbers and their backlink data. ### Find competitors and read their rankings - [DataForSEO + Kite](/integrations/dataforseo.md): DataForSEO is built into Kite. It supplies the domains that rank beside you for your searches, the keywords any domain ranks for with positions and changes, estimated visitors, and the month-by-month traffic trend Kite uses to follow each competitor. ### Compare competitors in the SEO tool your team already uses - [Semrush + Kite](/integrations/semrush.md): Kite reads your Semrush organic competitors, the keywords any domain ranks for, and the side-by-side comparison of your domain with up to four competitors. It can also look at a search's results in a past month to see whether a competitor's page climbed recently. ### Explain why a competitor ranks - [Ahrefs + Kite](/integrations/ahrefs.md): Kite reads the sites linking to your competitors and to the pages that outrank you. That shows whether a competitor wins on links or on content, and it finds sites that link to competitors but not to you. ## Common questions ### How do I do an SEO competitor analysis? Start with the searches, not the company names. List the searches that bring your site the most traffic, find the domains that rank beside you for them, and drop the platforms that rank for everything. For each real competitor, look at the keywords it ranks for, the pages that bring it the most traffic, and the searches where it ranks and you don't. Then decide whether each gap calls for a new page or a better one. Kite runs each of these steps with its built-in search data and comes back with the pages it recommends. ### Can I track competitors' rankings for free? You can do part of it. Google Search Console is free, but it only covers your own site, so it can't show you a competitor's rankings. You can search Google by hand to see who ranks for a keyword, though that gives you one result for one search on one day. Seeing a competitor's full set of rankings and how they move takes a paid data source. Kite includes one, so you don't need a separate subscription. For a comparison of the dedicated tools, see Best Rank Tracking Software for Small Teams (coming soon). ### How often should I check competitors' rankings? Weekly is enough for most teams. Rankings shift by a place or two from day to day, and reacting to that noise wastes time. A weekly check catches the moves that matter, such as a new competitor page climbing into the top three for one of your searches. A monthly look at each competitor's traffic trend shows who is gaining ground over time. ### Can Kite track competitors' rankings in other countries? Kite's built-in competitor rankings cover Google's results in the United States in English. Kite can research keywords for another country or language. If you connect Semrush, Kite reads the regional database for the country you sell into, which lets it compare competitors in that market. ### Can Kite tell me when a competitor overtakes me on a search? Kite's ranking alerts follow your own positions on the keywords you track. When one of them drops, Kite can look up which pages now rank above yours, so you can see whether a competitor took the spot. Your weekly competitor check covers the other side, since it reports when a competitor's page climbs on a search you care about. ### Do competitors who rank in Google also show up in AI answers? Often, but not always. Some companies rank well in Google and rarely get named by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude, while others get recommended in AI answers with modest search rankings. Kite measures the two separately and compares them. To see quickly who AI assistants recommend instead of you, try Kite's free [AI visibility checker](/ai-visibility-checker), which asks those four assistants your customers' questions and shows the results in about 45 seconds. The full work is covered in [Improve your visibility in AI answers](/use-cases/ai-answer-visibility.md).