A Competitor Wrote a Comparison Page About You. Now What?

A competitor published a comparison page about you. What do you do?

Publish your own version and challenge only the claims that are factually wrong. You almost certainly cannot get the page removed, and trying is usually a waste of a month. What you can do is make sure the buyer reading about you also finds something written by you.

The first reaction is always the same. Somebody sends the link in Slack, everyone reads it, and there is a strong urge to send a legal letter.

That urge is understandable and rarely productive. Here is how we would actually work through it.

Why do competitors build these pages?

Because the queries convert. Someone searching your brand against an alternative is late in a buying process and close to a decision, which makes those the most valuable pages on a competitor's site. It is not personal and it is not unusual.

The strategy also works in one direction. A smaller company writes about a bigger one, because the bigger name has the search demand. If a competitor has built a page about you, they have told you something useful about how they see the market.

So the correct emotional register is mild flattery followed by a plan. You are the reference point in that comparison, which is a position worth defending properly rather than angrily.

Can you make them take it down?

Generally not, and this is the part teams spend the most energy on for the least return. Writing a comparison of two products, including naming a competitor, is ordinary commercial speech in most jurisdictions. Whether your specific situation is different is a question for your own counsel, and we are not in a position to answer it.

Where you do have leverage is with claims that are demonstrably false rather than merely unflattering. A page saying your product lacks a feature it plainly has is a different thing from a page saying your product is worse.

Even then, a polite factual correction sent to a named person usually works faster than a formal letter. Most of these pages are written by a marketer who has not used your product and got something wrong from an old screenshot. Point it out and it often gets fixed.

What can you actually challenge?

Specific, objective, checkable claims, and nothing else. Pricing you do not actually charge. A feature they say you lack that you do have. A limit that stopped existing two releases ago. An integration you fully support. Those are factual corrections rather than opinions, and a reasonable company will make them when asked.

The principle behind this is that claims need backing. The United States Federal Trade Commission states that "Before disseminating an ad, advertisers must have adequate substantiation for all objective product claims conveyed, expressly or by implication, to consumers acting reasonably." That standard applies to their claims about you as much as to yours about yourself.

Note the phrase "or by implication." A page that technically states nothing false while creating a clearly wrong impression is the harder case, and the one most worth raising, because it is the version that actually damages you.

Keep a dated record of what the page said when you read it. Pages get edited quietly, and if this ever becomes a serious matter, a screenshot with a date is worth more than a memory.

Can they bid on your brand name in ads?

On Google, yes for the keywords themselves, but with real limits on what the ad can say. Google's advertising trademark policy permits using trademarks as keywords and does not restrict that, so a competitor bidding on your brand name is operating within the rules rather than breaking them.

The ad copy is where the line sits. Google states that it restricts "Using trademarks in an ad from a direct competitor" and "Ads that use the trademark in a confusing, deceptive, or misleading way." So a competitor can appear on your brand search but generally should not be putting your trademark in their headline.

Google's policy does carve out space for informational pages, allowing ads "where the primary purpose of the landing page is to provide informative details about products or services corresponding to the trademark." A genuine comparison page can qualify, which is worth knowing before you file a complaint that will not go anywhere.

The practical response is to make sure you own the top of your own brand search. That is cheaper and more reliable than trying to remove somebody else. We covered the economics in our notes on bidding on your own brand terms.

Should you build your own comparison page?

Yes, and of everything on this list it is the response with the highest return. A buyer late in a decision is going to search your name against theirs whether you like it or not. The only thing you control is whether what they find includes a page written by the people who built the product.

Your page has an advantage theirs cannot match, which is that you actually know your product. Their page is written from your marketing site and a trial account. Yours can be specific in ways that read as credible immediately.

It also compounds. A comparison page is the kind of content AI answer engines pull from when someone asks which of two tools to pick, so the same page works in Google, in ChatGPT and in Perplexity. Our notes on building B2B comparison pages cover the structure.

What should your version say about them?

The truth, including the places where they are genuinely the better choice. This feels counterintuitive and it is the whole trick of the format. A comparison page where you happen to win every single row reads as marketing, and a buyer discounts the entire page the moment they notice the pattern.

Name the cases where the buyer should choose the competitor. Smaller teams, a different budget, a specific integration you do not have. Saying so costs you the deals you were going to lose anyway and earns credibility on every other row.

Be scrupulous with their facts. Check their current pricing and features on the day you publish, date the comparison, and fix it when it changes. If you want the right to correct their page about you, your page about them has to be correct.

How do you handle it in sales conversations?

Assume the buyer has already read it, and answer it before they think to ask. A prospect who has seen a competitor's comparison page arrives carrying three or four specific objections, and the awkward part is that they often will not raise any of them out loud.

Give your team the actual answers. Not talking points, but a short document covering each claim on that page, what is accurate, what is out of date, and what is a fair criticism. The fair criticisms matter most, because a rep who can concede one gracefully is more persuasive on the rest.

Then feed what you hear back into the page. The objections that keep coming up in calls belong on your comparison page, answered properly, which is the same loop we described in our notes on running win loss analysis.

When is the right answer to ignore it?

When nobody is actually reading it, which is more often than you would guess. A comparison page sitting on a site with no search visibility is not a commercial problem, and responding to it publicly can hand it exactly the attention it was never going to earn on its own.

Check before you act. If the page does not rank for the comparison query and is not cited by AI answers, you have discovered that this is an emotional problem rather than a commercial one.

Also ignore pure opinion. A page saying your interface is dated or your onboarding is slow is a subjective judgement, and arguing with it in public makes you look thin skinned. If enough people say it, the useful response is to fix the product.

What would we do in the first week?

Screenshot it with a date on it, list every factual error you can prove, send that list politely to a named person rather than a generic inbox, and start your own comparison page. Four actions, none of which needs a lawyer, and between them they cover every realistic outcome here.

Then check whether the page actually ranks before investing further. Effort should follow visibility, not annoyance, and those two rarely point the same direction in the first forty eight hours.

If you want help building a comparison page that holds up under scrutiny, or a read on how much the competitor's page is really costing you, we are happy to work through it. You can find us at phoenix.studio.