Competitors
Find and track competitors, read the search landscape, competitor pages, changes and keyword gaps.
The Competitors page shows who you're up against in search, which buyer-journey pages they publish that you don't, and the keywords they win. Every tracked competitor is analysed: LogNorm reads their site, classifies their pages, pulls their search metrics and turns what you're missing into moves in your backlog.
Open it from the app sidebar under Research: Competitors. Competitor tracking depends on your plan, and so does the number of competitors you can track per website.
Find your competitors
You don't have to know your competitors up front. On an empty page, click Discover competitors (later it's the Find more button in the header). Discovery takes about a minute and runs in the background; a progress bar shows what it's doing.
Search data first
Discovery starts from data, not guesses. Candidates come from:
- The search landscape: sites ranking for your keywords that LogNorm classified as direct or indirect competitors (see below). Subdomains fold into one site, so
docs.acme.comandacme.comare one competitor. - Organic overlap: sites that share ranking keywords with your domain, with how many keywords you have in common.
- Earlier suggestions, which are re-checked on every run so ones that turn out not to be competitors leave the list.
LogNorm then reads each candidate's homepage and judges what the site is to you, whether it sells to the same buyers, whether it's in the same category, and how big a threat it is. Your own sites (including the ones you list in Company Brain → Brand identity) are never suggested, and neither are large platforms, marketplaces, social networks and publishers that share keywords with everyone.
When AI suggestions are used
When search data yields fewer than four competitors LogNorm is sure about (typically a new site with little search data, or a niche market), it also asks an AI model which competitors a buyer would compare you with. Those proposals go through the same checks: a domain that doesn't answer, or whose homepage never mentions the proposed brand, is dropped. Suggestions found this way carry a Market peer badge; ones found in search carry Search overlap.
Your first discovery
When you have no tracked competitors yet, the first discovery tracks the top suggestions for you: up to five, capped by your plan's limit, and only ones LogNorm is sure about. Each is analysed straight away. The rest wait in Suggested for your call. Discovery also refreshes the search landscape once it finishes.
Suggested, tracked and ignored
Every site on the page has one of three statuses:
| Status | Where it shows | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Suggested | The Suggested list | A proposal only. Not analysed, not used by moves. Sorted by how strongly it competes. |
| Tracked | The Tracking cards | Analysed, counts against your plan's competitor limit, feeds moves, keywords and scheduled analysis. |
| Ignored | The collapsed "ignored sites" list at the bottom | Hidden from future suggestions and never used. |
On a suggestion, click Track or Ignore. Tracking a site that has never been analysed starts its analysis. On a tracked competitor, the … menu has Analyze again, Ignore and Remove; on an ignored one it has Track and Move back to suggestions.
Discovery never removes a site you tracked, ignored or added by hand. If it judges one of them not to be a competitor, it only updates the verdict chips you see.
Add a competitor by hand
- Click Add competitor
It's in the page header, or on the empty page next to Discover competitors.
- Enter the website
A domain like
acme.com, and optionally a display name. The dialog shows how many competitor slots your plan has left. - Click Add and analyze
The competitor is tracked and its analysis starts. Your own domain and sites listed as yours in Brand identity are rejected.
Competitor kind and threat
Each competitor carries LogNorm's call on what it is to you, shown as chips on its card, in Suggested and on its detail page. Hover a chip to see how sure LogNorm is.
| Kind | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Direct competitor | Sells a product that solves the same problem for the same kind of buyer; a buyer would shortlist both. |
| Indirect competitor | Solves the same problem another way, or as one module of a broader product. |
| Adjacent | A related product your buyers use alongside yours; it doesn't replace you. |
| Publisher | Media, blog, course or community site; sells no competing product. |
| Directory | Lists, ranks or reviews many vendors. |
| Marketplace | App store, code host or platform where many vendors list products. |
| Not related | A different market. |
The threat chip (low, medium or high) weighs product overlap and search overlap. Under a suggestion you also see Same buyers and Same category with a likelihood for each. When LogNorm isn't sure about the kind, the suggestion says "LogNorm isn't sure this is a competitor. Your call." Discovery only drops suggestions it's sure are not direct or indirect competitors.
The Competitors overview
Once you track competitors, the page shows, top to bottom:
- Competitive landscape: how many you track out of your plan's limit, and three tiles: Gap moves (links to your competitor-gap moves), Gap keywords and Their pages.
- Organic traffic: estimated monthly visits from Google search, you against each tracked competitor. It fills in once an analysis finishes.
- Tracking: one card per tracked competitor with its kind and threat, a positioning summary, traffic, keywords, pages, and page-type chips. Coral chips are page types they have and you don't.
- Who you're really up against in search: the search landscape (next section).
- Page inventory by type: a matrix of every page type, your count against each competitor's. Coral cells are types they cover and you don't; click a count to open those pages.
- Suggested, then the collapsed list of ignored sites.
Who you're up against in search
Your real search competition is rarely only product rivals. The landscape takes every site ranking for your targeted and suggested keywords, from data LogNorm already has (saved search results, keyword signals and the overlap list from discovery), and sorts each into a kind: Direct competitors, Indirect competitors, Publishers & blogs, Review sites, Directories, Forums & Q&A, Marketplaces & platforms, Docs & references and Other.
A bar shows each kind's share of rankings on your keywords. Below it, one card per kind lists the top sites with how many of your keywords each ranks for and its average position. Sites LogNorm is unsure about carry an Unsure chip. If direct competitors rank for your keywords and you don't track them yet, the panel says how many, and each has a Track button that goes through the normal add flow (plan limit and analysis included).
Click Refresh to re-read the landscape. It re-classifies from cached data and doesn't fetch new search results. If the landscape is empty, you need keywords first: see Keywords, then click Map the landscape.
Competitor analysis
Analysis is what turns a tracked site into intelligence. It runs when you start tracking a competitor, when you click Analyze again, and on your schedule if you set one. Each run uses credits (see Credits and billing). An analysis:
- Builds an inventory of every URL in their sitemaps and homepage links, without fetching the pages.
- Reads a budget of pages in full (title, H1, description, word count): new pages first, then buyer-journey pages such as comparisons, alternatives, integrations and use cases. Each run reads pages it hasn't read before, so coverage grows over time.
- Classifies every page into a page type, and flags pages aimed at you.
- Pulls their search metrics and the keyword gap against your domain.
- Writes a positioning summary: what they sell, to whom, how they position, and their differentiators.
- Creates moves for the gaps it finds.
The competitor detail page
Click a competitor card to open its page. It shows:
- Positioning: the summary, who they sell to, their differentiators and why they're a competitor. If the summary couldn't be written (usually a temporary AI provider error), use Analyze again; search data is cached, so it's quick.
- Four tiles comparing them with you: Organic traffic, Ranking keywords, Top-10 rankings and Pages discovered.
- Compare page types: every page on their site against yours, by type.
- Moves from the competitor: the gaps this analysis turned into moves.
- What changed and Pages aimed at you (below).
- Keyword gap and Their pages.
Page types
Competitor pages use the same page types as your own site, so the two compare one to one: Home, Product, Solution, Use case, Industry, Comparison, Alternatives, Integration, Pricing, Customers, Blog, Docs, Company, Legal and Other. The URL decides where it's conclusive; LogNorm classifies the rest.
Their pages lists the full inventory with filter chips per type, a search over URL, title and H1, a Read / Not read yet filter and sorting (journey pages first, URL A–Z, most words, recently modified).
Pages aimed at you
Pages that compare the competitor against you by name, or are written to win your buyers ("you alternatives", "them vs you"), are flagged Aimed at you, with how likely that is.
What changed
Each analysis compares the competitor's pages with the previous one. Pages that are new since then appear in What changed, labelled with what they signal:
- Comparison vs you, Alternatives page, Pricing change, New feature or product, New integration
- New content and Minor, which carry no competitive signal
Changes worth a response are marked Worth a response, and the significant ones in the first five categories become moves (for example "Answer Acme's new comparison with you"), with a View move link.
Keyword gaps and moves
The keyword gap
The Keyword gap table lists keywords the competitor ranks for in Google, in your website's market, where your domain doesn't rank in the top 100: volume, difficulty, intent, their rank and the page that ranks. Brand searches (theirs, another competitor's or yours) are tagged Brand and sorted to the bottom: they're real data but not content opportunities.
Gap keywords where the competitor ranks in the top 30 are also added straight away as suggestions in Keywords → Discover, with the competitor's ranking page as evidence, where you decide whether to target or skip them.
Gap keywords grouped into articles
LogNorm then turns the gap into article moves. It drops brand searches, navigational and low-volume keywords, and keywords you skipped; screens out ones irrelevant to your business; and groups the rest into articles one page could rank for. Each group becomes a blog post move with its primary keyword, combined volume and average difficulty, up to five per analysis. Groups are filed under your existing topics, or proposed as a new suggested topic in the Blog planner (see Topics and clusters).
Comparison and alternatives moves
For each tracked competitor, the analysis checks your own pages and creates:
- You vs them: a comparison page, when you have no page comparing the two.
- Their alternatives: an alternatives page for people switching away, when you have none.
- Publish integration pages or Publish use-case pages, when a competitor has at least two of those pages and you have none.
Moves are sized by the competitor's traffic and supported by related searches when they exist. Re-running an analysis refreshes a move's evidence rather than creating a duplicate. All of these land in your backlog with the source competitor gap; the Gap moves tile on the overview takes you there. See Moves and ranking for how they're ranked against everything else.
Scheduled analysis
Competitors change their sites without telling you. Use the schedule control in the Competitors header to re-analyse every tracked competitor Daily, Weekly or Monthly (the default is Off). Each scheduled run picks up new pages, keyword changes and refreshed moves, and uses the same credits as a manual analysis.
- The next run is counted from the last run, manual or scheduled, so clicking Analyze again pushes it out.
- Schedules run only on a paid plan or during a trial; otherwise the setting is kept but paused.
- A run that can't start (for example, out of credits) is skipped with the reason shown and retried after a full interval.
More in Automation and schedules.