Find out how a competitor builds pages, not just what they publish
Knowing a competitor wrote about a topic is not useful on its own. You probably wrote about it too. The useful question is what is different about their page, and that needs reading the page.
Why does knowing their topics not help?
Because topic overlap is high and tells you nothing about why they win. You both have a page about the same thing. Theirs ranks. A list of their URLs does not explain that, and the usual next step is writing a second page about a topic you already covered.
The difference is usually structural and boring: their page carries Article schema and yours does not, their headings are the questions people actually ask and yours are section titles, their page links to nine others and yours links to none.
What does the comparison show?
Both sites are crawled and compared signal by signal, with counts on each side. The output is not a score, it is a list of pages to fix.
- Structured data coverage
- How many of their pages carry Article or FAQ schema against how many of yours. This is the strongest single signal in whether an assistant quotes a page.
- Question-shaped headings
- Whether their headings are phrased as the questions readers ask, with the answer directly underneath, which is the shape an assistant can lift.
- Internal linking and page depth
- How many internal links their pages carry, and the median word count on each side.
- Publishing frequency and freshness
- How many pages they added or updated in the last ninety days against how many you did, and how stale the body of each site is. Measured from each sitemap.
- Who to compare against, worked out for you
- Suggested from domains already holding positions for your keywords and domains assistants already name in answers about your topics.
See your own structured data and heading coverage first, free and without an account.
Run the free scanWhat it does not do
It reads twenty of their pages, not their whole site. Their site is almost certainly larger than what is read, and the report says so on every run.
It never claims a difference is the cause of their ranking. It reports what differs. Coverage is not causation and a tool that asserts otherwise teaches people to chase the wrong work.
It obeys their robots.txt, so anything they have asked crawlers to leave alone is absent from the counts.
It does not report backlinks or Domain Authority, for the same reason nothing else here does.
Competitor scans, keyword research and published articles, from thirty five dollars a month.
Run the free scanQuestions worth asking first
Is crawling a competitor's site allowed?
Reading public pages is ordinary practice and every major SEO tool does it. This one obeys the robots.txt rules a site publishes, honours any crawl delay it asks for, and reads twenty pages slowly rather than mirroring the site.
How do I know which competitors to check?
The page suggests them from data already collected: domains holding positions for your keywords, and domains named by AI assistants in answers about your topics. A domain appearing in both is the strongest signal available.
What if we are ahead on everything?
The report says so, and that is a finding rather than a blank screen. It means the difference between you is not in how the pages are built, so the thing to examine is which topics they cover or who links to them.