How to Find What Your Competitors Are Blogging About

To find what your competitors are blogging about, pull their blog feed, list every post title and topic, then sort by what earns them traffic and what AI answers already cite. You do not need paid tools. You need their sitemap, their RSS feed, and a way to see which topics get repeated. Do that and you can see the exact content roadmap they spent months building. This post shows you how, step by step.

Why bother looking at competitor blogs?

Your competitors already tested demand for you. Every post they published is a bet on a keyword or a question their buyers ask. The ones they update often or link to internally are usually the ones working. That is free market research. The catch is that most founders skim a few posts and call it done. You want the full list, not a sample.

There is a second reason that matters more in 2026. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question in your space, those answers cite blog posts. If your competitor owns the topics that AI cites, the AI recommends them and never mentions you. Knowing their topics is the first step to taking that ground back.

How do you find every post a competitor has published?

Start with the sources that are already public. In order:

1. Open their blog and add /sitemap.xml or /blog/sitemap.xml to the domain. This lists every URL, often with the last-modified date so you can see what they update.
2. Check for an RSS feed at /feed, /rss, or /blog/feed. Feeds give you titles, dates, and summaries in one clean file.
3. Search Google with site:competitor.com/blog to see indexed posts and how Google titles them.
4. Scan their categories and tags pages. These reveal how they group topics, which tells you their content pillars.

Copy every title into a spreadsheet. Add the publish date and the URL. Once you have 30 or 40 rows, the patterns show up on their own.

How do you spot which topics actually work?

A long list is not the goal. The signal is repetition and freshness. Look for these tells:

• Clusters. Five posts on the same subtopic means they see money there.
• Recent updates. A 2022 post modified last month is a post they refuse to let die. That is a winner.
• Internal links. Posts they link to from many other pages are the ones they push traffic toward.
• Comparison and how-to titles. These pull buyers, not browsers, and they get cited by AI answers more often.

Now flip it. The gaps are just as useful. Questions your buyers ask that no competitor has answered well are the fastest posts to rank, because you are not fighting an entrenched page.

How do you turn their topics into your plan?

Do not copy their titles one to one. Copying puts you second on every topic. Instead, use their list as a demand map and go deeper or narrower where they are thin. A simple filter:

1. Keep the topics that appear across two or more competitors. Shared coverage means real demand.
2. Drop anything that is pure brand or company news. That only works for them.
3. For each kept topic, ask what question they answered badly or skipped. Write that post better.
4. Add long-tail angles they ignored. See how to find long-tail keywords for free for the method.

Where does AI visibility fit in?

Ranking on Google is only half the game now. The other half is being the source an AI answer quotes. When you research competitor blogs, note which of their posts show up when you ask an AI a question in your niche. Those are the pages stealing your recommendations. To check where you stand, run your own domain through an AI visibility check and read up on answer engine optimization so your new posts get cited, not just indexed.

The short version

Pull the sitemap and feed, list every post, sort by clusters and freshness, find the gaps, and write the version that answers the question better. Do it by hand once so you understand the moves. Then let a tool do the pulling and grouping so you spend your time writing instead of scraping. Either way, you stop guessing what to publish and start building on demand that is already proven.