You can find competitor keywords free, but only half of the picture. Without paying anything you can learn what a rival is aiming at: the phrases in its URLs, page titles and ads. What you cannot get for free is where those pages rank and how many visits they bring. Here is what each free method gives you, what it leaves out, and the smallest paid step that fills the hole.
1. Their sitemap
Cost: nothing. Time: five minutes.
Type the competitor's domain followed by /sitemap.xml. If that page is empty, look at /robots.txt on the same site, which often points to the sitemap. Large sites split it into several files; open the ones named for blog posts or guides.
What you get: a list of every URL they want search engines to know about. Since most sites write the main phrase into the URL, a slug like /blog/budget-meal-planner tells you the page targets "budget meal planner".
What you miss: whether that page ranks at all.
2. Page titles and headings
Cost: nothing. Time: twenty minutes for a dozen pages.
Open their most important pages and look at the browser tab title and the big heading at the top. Those two usually hold the main keyword. The smaller section headings underneath often hold related phrases.
What you get: the exact wording they chose for each topic.
What you miss: again, results. A beautifully titled page can sit on page five.
3. A site: search
Cost: nothing. Time: a few minutes per topic.
Search Google for site:theirdomain.com plus a topic, for example site:theirdomain.com packing list. Google shows which of their pages it connects to that topic.
What you get: a quick sense of how much they have published on a subject.
What you miss: completeness. Google's own documentation says a site: query does not list every indexed page and that big sites should not expect to see all their URLs. It is a sample, nothing more.
4. Their ads
Cost: nothing. Time: ten minutes.
Search the competitor's name in Google's Ads Transparency Center. It shows the search ads they run. If an ad has been running for months, someone keeps paying for it, which suggests the search behind it brings customers.
What you miss: the actual keywords they bid on. Google does not publish those.
5. Keyword Planner with their URL
Cost: free with a Google Ads account. Time: ten minutes.
In Google Keyword Planner, choose "start with a website" and paste a competitor page. Google reads the page content and suggests related keywords with search volumes.
What you miss: these are ideas related to the page, not keywords the page ranks for.
What all five have in common
They show plans, not wins. A company can publish pages for hundreds of phrases and rank well for a fraction of them. If you copy the free list, you copy the failures along with the successes, with no way to tell them apart.
The cheapest paid step
To see rankings, you need keyword data. On seogeoaeo.ai there is no subscription to a big suite; you pay credits per run. The Competitor Keywords tool costs 35 credits: enter a domain and a country, and it returns up to 100 keywords the site ranks for, each with position, search volume, difficulty, cost per click, estimated visits and the ranking page. It also picks out easy blog topics and keywords worth bidding on.
The smallest plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, enough for roughly fifty-seven lookups. Monthly credits do not roll over, so it suits a month of focused research better than an idle subscription. Every tool shows its price before running, and a run that fails before producing a result costs nothing. Full prices are on the seogeoaeo.ai pricing page.
One honest limit: it does not track your own rankings over time. If you want a daily rank chart, a suite like Semrush with its Position Tracking tool does that job.
A sensible free-then-paid order
- Do the sitemap and title pass on your top two or three rivals to learn their language.
- Check their ads to see which topics they spend money on.
- Spend 35 credits per rival to see which of those topics actually rank.
- Keep only keywords where their page is beatable and the search fits what you offer.