BusinessFree
Competitor Playbook Built From Their Website
One competitor's website in, and you get their offerings, their pricing where it's public, what their customers keep complaining about, the searches they win, and where they're actually beatable.
Every small business has one competitor who occupies more mental space than the rest combined — the one that keeps winning the bids, ranks above you, and seems to be everywhere. Most owners study them by occasionally looking at their website and feeling bad. That produces anxiety, not a plan.
This does the teardown properly. It reads their entire site rather than the homepage, extracts what they actually sell and how they price where pricing is public, reads what their customers complain about in reviews, checks which search terms they win and how strong their site is, and compares all of it against you. The output is a playbook: where they are genuinely strong, where they are weak, and the specific moves available to you.
The most useful finding is usually not that they are better. It is that they are winning on one specific thing — a service you do not list, a page you never wrote, a follow-up process you do not have — while carrying a weakness their own customers describe in public. Those are both actionable, and neither is visible from staring at their homepage.
What to actually look for in a competitor
Their reviews are the closest thing to a leaked internal document you will ever get. Customers describe the operational failures in detail and in public: the callbacks that never came, the quote that changed, the crew that arrived late. Those complaints are stable over time because they come from how the business is structured, not from a bad week. If a competitor's customers have complained about scheduling for three straight years, that is not going to be fixed before you can take advantage of it — and you can say so directly in your own marketing without ever naming them.
Search visibility is usually about page count, not cleverness. When a competitor outranks you it is rarely because of some technique — it is almost always because they have a page for each service in each area they serve and you have one page listing everything. This is dull and it is decisive, and it is fixable by writing the pages. The teardown counts their pages by type so you can see exactly what the gap is instead of guessing at algorithms.
Public pricing is rarer than people expect and more revealing when present. Most local businesses hide it, so when a competitor publishes rates, minimums, or service-call fees they have made a deliberate positioning choice — usually to filter out price shoppers or to signal transparency. If they publish and you do not, you are losing every customer who wanted a number before calling. If neither publishes, that is an opening, though a real one to think through rather than an automatic win.
How it works
Name the competitor
Their site, your business, and what you most want to understand about them.
River takes them apart
Their whole site, their reviews, their search visibility, and their pricing if it's public.
See the comparison
Where they're genuinely strong, where they're weak, and how you compare.
Work the playbook
Ranked moves by effort and payoff, in a doc you can keep working from in chat.
What you get
- Their full service and offering list, pulled from their whole site
- Their public pricing, terms, and guarantees where they publish any
- The complaints their customers repeat, counted from real reviews
- The search terms they win and how strong their site actually is
- A side-by-side of them against you, with the gaps named
- Specific moves to take, ranked by effort against payoff
Common questions
Is this legal and above board?
Yes. Everything it reads is public: their website, their public reviews, and their search rankings. This is the same research any competitor could do manually by spending a day on it, done in a few minutes. It does not access anything private, does not attempt to get behind a login, and does not do anything you could not do yourself with a browser and patience.
What if their pricing isn't on their site?
Then the report says so, which is itself a finding. Most local businesses do not publish pricing, and the report will note it rather than inventing a range. Where pricing signals do exist — service-call fees, minimums, financing offers, published packages, or figures mentioned in reviews — those get captured and flagged for what they are. It will never present an estimated price as though it were their actual price.
Can I run this on more than one competitor?
Yes, one at a time, and comparing two or three reports is genuinely useful — recurring patterns across all of them usually reveal something structural about your market rather than about any single business. If you want the whole field at once rather than a deep read on one, the Local Market Map tool covers the full competitor set instead.
Will it tell me to lower my prices?
It is specifically instructed not to default to that. Competing on price is the reflexive recommendation and it is nearly always wrong for a small business, because the competitor usually has more scale to absorb a price war than you do. The report looks for positioning, service, responsiveness, and coverage gaps first, and only discusses pricing where the evidence genuinely points there.
How current is the information?
It reads their site and their search visibility live at the time you run it, so it reflects the present state. Review data reflects what has been published to date. Search rankings move, so treat ranking findings as a snapshot rather than a permanent fact — the structural findings, like how many service pages they have and what their customers complain about, change much more slowly and are the more durable part of the report.
What if they're just genuinely better than me?
Then the report will say so, and that is worth knowing precisely. Even then the useful output is specific rather than demoralizing: better how, on which dimensions, and what would it actually take to close each one. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that you should not compete with them head-on and should instead own a segment or an area they treat as an afterthought — and the report will say that when the evidence supports it.
Competitor Playbook Built From Their Website
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