About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Copying competitors is tempting when visibility drops.
In digital marketing, competitive research has always been a foundational step. We look at what our competitors are doing, identify where they are succeeding and figure out how to close the gap, but there is a very fine line between researching a competitor and blindly copying them.
Right now, as AI continues to change search, many marketing leaders are feeling the pressure of volatility. When rankings drop or organic traffic stalls, the natural instinct in the boardroom is to point at the competitor currently occupying the top spot and say, “Whatever they are doing, we need to do that too.”
Over my career in digital marketing, I have watched this exact reaction lead companies down very dangerous paths. When teams panic about visibility, they often mimic tactics without understanding the strategy behind them. In the AI era, copying competitor search strategies is more dangerous than ever, and it is a fast track to destroying your unique brand equity and burning your marketing budget.
Copied content feeds an echo chamber.
To understand why this is so dangerous, you have to look at how content is currently being produced. The barrier to generating content has dropped to nearly zero, and many of your competitors are actively using AI to spin up large amounts of programmatic content.
If you conduct a content gap analysis and simply decide to rewrite the articles your competitors are publishing, you are likely just feeding an AI model the exact same synthesized information it already generated for someone else, and you end up in an echo chamber.
Search ecosystems do not need another generic summary of a widely understood topic. When you copy competitor content structures that lack real depth, you blend into a sea of sameness and give search engines and large language models (LLMs) no reason to prioritize your website or cite your brand as an authority.
Copying a competitor means inheriting their hidden flaws.
Another big danger of mimicking a competitor is that you inherit all of their hidden mistakes. When you look at a competitor ranking well, you only see the outside. You do not see their profit margins, their customer churn rate or their lead-to-close ratio.
A competitor might be generating thousands of organic visits by targeting high-volume keywords, but if those visitors have zero intent to buy, that traffic is worthless. If you copy their keyword strategy, you might capture some of their traffic, and you will also gain their unqualified leads and spend your own budget to replicate a broken funnel.
You also do not know if the competitor is relying on outdated shortcuts or blackhat tactics that are on the verge of being penalized by the next algorithm update. Following their lead means taking on all of their undocumented risk.
True competitive differentiation starts with your own expertise.
If you want to capture market share in AI-driven search, you have to stop looking sideways at your competitors and start looking inward at your own expertise. Here is how we build strategies that lead the market rather than follow it.
1. Audit for intent as well as volume.
When you use tools to analyze competitor keywords, do not blindly export the list and hand it to your writers. Audit the intent behind every single query, and ask whether the intent behind each keyword aligns with the complex B2B services you actually sell. If a competitor is ranking for a top-of-funnel informational term that mainly attracts students or entry-level researchers, let them have it, and focus your resources on the mid-funnel and bottom-funnel queries where actual buying decisions are made. As I covered in rebalancing your content funnel for AI search, you should still find the valuable gaps to fill at the top of the funnel.
2. Create what AI and competitors cannot.
True competitive advantage comes from publishing distinctive content that AI cannot easily replicate and competitors cannot legally copy, and that means leaning heavily into your proprietary data and information.
If you have years of client success metrics, turn them into an original industry study. Develop unique, named methodologies for how your firm solves complex problems, and highlight specific case studies that demonstrate your lived experience. When you publish original research, you give the entire industry, including AI models, a reason to cite your brand as the primary source.
3. Emphasize your brand voice.
Google’s algorithm is designed to reward strong signals of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), and you cannot copy actual expertise.
Your content should feature the specific subject matter experts within your organization and the unique value of their expertise. It should reflect your unique brand narrative and take confident positions that challenge industry consensus. A competitor can copy your formatting, but they still cannot copy the lived experience and trusted voice of your team.
Brands that lead stay ahead of the ones that follow.
If your digital strategy consists entirely of looking at what the competition did yesterday, you will always be a step behind. Do not let boardroom panic push you into mimicking generic content or chasing vanity metrics that do not drive revenue.
Ask for clarity, rely on your own documented goals and focus on delivering the expertise your brand is uniquely positioned to provide. The question is whether you are building a differentiated strategy or becoming a slightly worse version of your biggest competitor. If you want to build visibility that AI tools cite, our AI search team can help.