Looking for a free competitor finder tool? Here is the honest version: the free methods are good, they just cost time instead of money. You can find most of your rivals with a browser, a spreadsheet and an hour. A paid lookup earns its price only once you have more keywords than you can check by hand. Below are the free options first, then the cheapest paid step.
1. Google itself (free)
This is the oldest competitor finder and it still works.
- List 10 to 20 phrases a customer would type. Include what you sell ("browser puzzle games") and the problem people have ("games to play on a school laptop").
- Search each phrase in a private window, set to the country you care about.
- Copy every domain from the top ten into a sheet. Count how often each one appears.
The domains near the top of your count are your search rivals. Leave out Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit unless they lead nearly every search; they rank for almost everything.
What it costs: an hour. Where it breaks: past a few dozen phrases, the counting takes over your afternoon.
One trick people still look for is gone. Google dropped the related: search operator in 2023, so you cannot type related:yoursite.com any more.
2. AI assistants (free on most plans)
Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini what a customer would ask: "what are good free alternatives to [your site]". Note every name and every link they give. Ask twice, because the answers shift between sessions. Check Google's AI Overview for the same phrase.
What it costs: nothing. Where it breaks: you get a sample of answers, not a full picture, and a handful of prompts can mislead you.
3. Ad libraries (free)
Google's Ads Transparency Center, the Meta Ad Library and the LinkedIn Ad Library are free to search. Type category words, not only brand names, and see who pays to reach your audience.
What it costs: nothing. Where it breaks: only advertisers show up, and you will not see what they spend on most ads.
4. Review sites and your own players (free)
App stores, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Google Maps group similar products together. Read the "alternatives" and "compare" sections. Then ask your users what else they tried. That short list is often the most accurate one you will get.
5. A paid step, when counting gets old
When the spreadsheet gets too long, a keyword-overlap lookup does the same count for every keyword your site ranks for, not just the 20 you thought of.
seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Finder is the one we would pick. You enter a domain and a country, and it returns the 30 sites that share the most Google keywords with yours. For each site you see shared keywords, its estimated monthly visits and its average rank. Sites where at least 5% of their keywords overlap with yours are flagged as close competitors, and huge general sites are put in their own group.
| Free methods | Competitor Finder | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Your time | 38 credits per run |
| Keywords covered | The ones you type | Every Google keyword the domain ranks for |
| Finds offline or ads-only rivals | Ad libraries do | No |
| Good for a tiny new site | Yes | May find few close competitors |
It is not free. Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits on the seogeoaeo.ai pricing page, and each tool shows its price before it runs. What you can try without paying is a free site preview on the home page, which checks crawl, indexing, on-page and structured data health, not competitors.
Which should you use?
Start free. If your site is new and ranks for very little, the paid lookup may show you mostly giant sites, so the manual method is the better choice. Once you rank for hundreds of phrases, one 38-credit run replaces an afternoon of counting.