Most businesses have a fairly clear idea of who they think their competitors are. There is a list, and someone checks their websites, someone tracks their rankings, and someone gets mildly annoyed whenever they launch something.

But your customers might have a completely different list.

They are trying to solve a problem. The alternatives they consider depend on their budget, experience, existing tools and how much they actually care about solving it.

They have, rather inconveniently, not attended your positioning workshop.

This matters for SEO and AEO because we can spend a lot of time trying to beat businesses that aren't even in the customer's decision making process. Or ignoring ones that are.

Your market has more than one competitor list

Imagine you sell reporting software. You might track five other reporting platforms, comparing features, pricing and organic visibility.

Your potential customer might be considering a small specialist tool, asking their agency to handle reporting, or using something already included in another subscription. They might decide their spreadsheet is fine.

All of those options compete for the job you want to be paid for.

Search adds another set of competitors

I find it useful to separate three things:

  • The businesses you track: usually companies selling a similar product or service.
  • The alternatives customers consider: anything they might use to solve the problem, including doing it themselves or leaving it alone.
  • The sources competing for attention: the businesses, publishers, communities and tools appearing in search results and AI answers.

These overlap, but they require different responses. A publisher ranking above you might be somewhere to earn coverage. A smaller software company repeatedly appearing on buyers' shortlists needs investigating as a commercial rival.

For AEO specifically, the customer's circumstances can change the recommendations too. “Best reporting software” and a question from a small agency with particular integrations aren't equivalent research tasks.

Ask recent customers what they used before, what else they considered and why they changed. Include lost deals and people who decided to do nothing. Then look at searches and repeated AI answers around those actual situations.

Your existing competitor list is a starting point. Let the evidence change it.

AI might be on the shortlist now

There is another possibility businesses need to take seriously: the customer wondering whether their AI tools can do enough of the job already.

For our reporting company, that might mean feeding exports into an assistant, connecting an agent to existing data, or using AI to help build a small internal tool.

It doesn't have to replace every feature. It only has to cover enough of the customer's needs to make them question another subscription.

So make the comparison properly. What does your product provide beyond producing an answer? Reliable integrations, validated data, permissions, support, a maintained workflow? Which of those things matter enough for this customer to pay for?

I have a feeling that in the near future customers will realise that vibe coding their own solution is not worth the effort (or maintainability). But for now, it's very much on the cards and I think should be taken more seriously than it is.

Your organic content should help customers assess all of this. Show the setup, the maintenance and the limits of both approaches. Explain when buying makes sense, and when a simpler solution is sufficient.

There may also be an opportunity to make your product useful to their agents. I explored that shift in SEO is now AEO Whether You Like it or Not.

The work needs to help us compete

This is the bit I have to remind myself of.

I like research. I get excited about new projects, design and creative ideas. Give me an interesting problem and I can happily disappear into it for a while.

But eventually I need to explain how the work helps the business win. “I found it really interesting” is a difficult line item to approve.

Our organic strategy should help create a reason for the right customer to choose us, and make that reason easier to discover and believe.

April Dunford's positioning exercise makes a useful connection here: what makes a product different needs to translate into value for a customer. Being different on its own achieves very little.

Give people something worth choosing

For the reporting business, that could mean publishing original benchmarks from its own data, with a clear methodology. Or a practical tool that helps agencies calculate the time spent preparing client reports.

A detailed case study could demonstrate how it handles an awkward integration. An honest migration guide could remove a reason to stay with the current solution.

Those assets can create useful knowledge, build trust and make buying easier. They give the business something more substantial than another article assembled from the pages already ranking.

As I argued in Write for People, Obviously, expertise, research and experience are what make content valuable.

The foundations support the advantage

Technical SEO still matters enormously. A useful product page does very little for discovery if the important content can't be accessed.

Fixing that might simply bring you up to the expected standard. That is still necessary work. Every canonical fix doesn't need to become a TED talk about differentiation.

The point is to connect the work to what it enables: discoverable evidence, a usable website, a clearer buying decision, a stronger reputation.

Competitive advantage.

A useful question before the next project

Before starting, I want to be able to finish this sentence:

"How will this give the right customers a better reason to choose us?"

Then decide what would show it worked. Relevant visibility is useful, but so are qualified enquiries, fewer unresolved objections and customers naming your research or tool as a reason they trusted you.

Some benefits take time. We should still know what benefit we are trying to create.

And if the sentence ends with “because their website has one”, I would probably give it another go. They might have copied it from someone else. We could all be very busy achieving absolutely nothing.