A free competitor analysis template is easy to find. What is harder is filling it without paying for anything, because some columns have free official sources and some do not. This page gives you a template you can copy into any spreadsheet, then goes column by column: free, free for your own site only, or paid.
Copy the template
Make a sheet with your site in the first row and up to five rivals below it. Use these column headings:
Site, Role, Organic visits/mo, Keywords (top 10), Top pages, Shared keywords, Gap keywords, Referring domains, Content types, Google Ads, Social ads, AI citations, Notes.
That set comes from the template on the seogeoaeo.ai blog, which also has a CSV version and a filled-in example for an invented company. Nothing to install: paste the headings into Google Sheets or Excel and start.
Columns you can fill for free
Role. Ask whoever sells for you which companies they lose to, then search your main keywords on Google and note which sites keep showing up. Mark each row search, sales or both.
Content types. Open each rival's best pages and label them: guide, template, calculator, comparison page, category page or documentation. It costs only time, and it often explains a rival's traffic better than the numbers do.
Google Ads. Google's Ads Transparency Center lets you search an advertiser and see its ads with format, region and when each last ran.
Social ads. The Meta Ad Library shows active ads across Meta's apps. LinkedIn's Ad Library keeps ads for a year after their last impression and lets you search by company. Neither shows spend for ordinary ads, so note how long each ad has been running instead. A long-running ad is one the company keeps paying for.
Columns that are free for your own row only
Your traffic and links. Google Search Console shows real clicks and your top linking sites, but only for sites you have verified. Keep those real numbers in the Notes column, because they will not match any provider's estimate for a rival.
Your AI visibility. Search Console's Generative AI performance report, added in June 2026, shows AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions by page for your own site. It cannot tell you about anyone else.
Columns that need paid data
Organic visits, keyword counts, top pages, shared and gap keywords, and referring domains for a rival all come from data providers that estimate other people's sites. No official source opens those up for free.
The cheapest route is to pay per lookup rather than per seat. seogeoaeo.ai charges credits per run and shows the price before you start:
| Column | Tool | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Pick rivals, shared keywords | Competitor Finder | 38, once |
| Visits, keywords, links | Domain Overview | 50 |
| Top pages | Competitor Keywords | 35 |
| Gap keywords | Keyword Gap | 85 |
| AI citations for every row | AI Citation Finder, topic mode | 160, once |
Its ad finders also save the clicking: Competitor Google Ads costs 15 credits, and the Meta and LinkedIn ad finders cost 5 each. Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and a run that fails before giving a result is refunded. There is also a free preview of your own site's crawl, indexing, on-page and structured data health on the home page, though that is a health check rather than competitor data.
One rule for any template
Fill each column from one source for every row. Provider numbers are estimates and only line up with each other. Mixing a free estimate for one rival with a paid one for another makes the comparison meaningless.
When free is enough
If you only need to see what rivals say in ads and what kinds of pages they publish, the free columns are enough. If you want to know which of their pages bring traffic and which keywords you are missing, you need paid data for at least those two columns. And if you want daily rank positions, that is a rank tracker in a suite like Semrush, which seogeoaeo.ai does not offer.