Find Your Competitor's Clients Using Google (Legally)

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Want to see who’s working with your competitor — without paying for spy tools or scrapers?
There’s a simple Google trick that can reveal their clients in seconds.

Try this query:

Privacy Policies are goldmines. If your competitor processes personal data for their clients — say they handle analytics, bookings, payments, or emails — those clients are legally required to disclose that relationship in their Privacy Policy.

So when you search for: “Privacy Policy” pages mentioning your competitor, but exclude your competitor’s own site, you get a list of companies that probably use their service or software.

At my startup, we were doing market research to identify which industries our competitors were targeting most. Using this Google search method, we got some excellent intel.

Big shout-out to the Instant Data Scraper Chrome extension (use with caution) for saving us hours of copy-pasting links into spreadsheets — and to ChatGPT for helping us classify and tag the industries automatically.

Of course, not every result is relevant. Expect to do a bit of manual cleanup. This isn’t a silver bullet — if your competitor isn’t a data processor, or if you’re in an industry that doesn’t need to publish a Privacy Policy, this trick probably won’t work. And if your competitor’s name is a common word, you’ll get plenty of false positives.

You can also try the same idea with “Terms of Service” pages or experiment with other Google search operators to refine your results.

Happy hunting!