Whenever you’re trying to get from point A to point B, it helps to understand the terrain between the two. How far do you have to go? What hazards should you look out for? Where can you stop for gas? Knowing the landscape makes for a successful journey.
As a business owner or marketer, it’s all about the market landscape. Without a doubt, you’ll encounter competitors along the way, and they can slow down your progress. That’s why it's important to know exactly where they stand.
A competitive landscape analysis provides the information necessary to overcome your competitors and reach your destination. In this article, we’ll explain what a competitive landscape analysis is, describe some common competitive landscape analysis frameworks, and offer some techniques that demonstrate how to conduct a landscape analysis.
What Is a Competitive Landscape Analysis?
Competitive landscape analysis is the process of examining your market to identify your competitors and figure out where they stand with regard to other players, including you.
While the competitive landscape analysis process shares a lot in common with competitor analysis or market analysis, there’s an important distinction. Competitive landscape analysis is primarily focused on studying the relationship between businesses and how they relate to each other.
You can use the process to analyze and understand a variety of different metrics, such as:
- Market share
- Product offerings and pricing
- Website traffic data
- Positioning and messaging
- Company growth and trajectory
Competitive landscapes change over time, and they may look different depending on what metrics you’re analyzing. Because of this, competitive landscape analysis is usually considered an ongoing process.
There are also a variety of ways to organize your analysis. You may decide to use a simple spreadsheet or a more advanced competitive matrix. Either way, an understanding of the relationships between players on the field is the goal.
5 Competitive Landscape Analysis Frameworks
There are a variety of frameworks you can use for analyzing the competition. Different frameworks will yield different insights about the competitive landscape. Here are 5 common competitive landscape frameworks and some ideas on what insights they might generate.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a process of examining your business using a 2X2 grid. Each quadrant of the grid represents a letter in the acronym SWOT. In the quadrant, you write down your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats as they relate to your competition.
A SWOT analysis can be great for strategic planning, as it opens up ideas about potential opportunities to seize and threats to counteract.
Strategic Group Analysis
With a Strategic Group Analysis, you organize competitors into clusters according to their business models or strategies. The clusters help illustrate the landscape and better understand relationships between businesses.
Some criteria for clusters include:
- Product diversity
- Geographic coverage
- Markets served
- Distribution channels used
- Marketing strategies
- Product quality or pricing
A Strategic Group Analysis can help you pinpoint your closest competitors and understand the precise nature of the competition. It can also help you examine different strategies to realize opportunities or problems.
BCG Matrix
A BCG Matrix, popularized by the Boston Consulting Group (IE BCG), is a framework that helps you decide how to prioritize different products, services, or aspects of your business. The matrix examines items along two dimensions: growth and market share. The items are then placed in one of four categories:
- Pets — Items with low growth rate and low market share
- Question marks — products with small market share and high growth rates
- Stars — items with high market share and fast growth rate
- Cash cows — products with high market share but lower growth rates
Considering your products alongside competitor products can help you think about where to invest in terms of product development, product-line expansion, and product marketing.
Perceptual Mapping
Perceptual Mapping is a framework for understanding how your brand or product is positioned with regard to your competitors. With this framework, you place brands or products on a grid with two criteria defining the X and Y axis. For example, quality and price. Customer feedback is central for understanding how the market perceives a given business and product.
Perceptual mapping is useful for understanding how people think about your product compared to your competitors’, allowing you to make decisions about future positioning efforts.
Porter’s Five Forces
A Porter’s Five Forces analysis provides a framework for examining the overall competitiveness of a particular market. Overall competitiveness is determined based on five forces:
- The intensity of the competitive landscape
- Level of supplier power
- Buyer’s entry/exit costs
- The threat of substitute products
- Access to the market for new entrants
The Porter’s Five Forces framework can be especially useful if you’re interested in entering a new market or expanding a product line or service offering. It can help in identifying the key challenges you may face in your efforts.
How to Gather Data for a Competitive Landscape Analysis (with Examples)
Once you’ve selected the right competitive analysis framework for organizing your landscape analysis, you’ll need to figure out where to collect data about your competitors.
You might start by simply analyzing your competitors' websites or social media pages. You could also look at industry resources such as Statista, Pew, or Gartner. Or you might try a competitive intelligence software like Semrush Traffic & Market or Kompyte.
When you need data on competitor paid or organic web traffic, traffic generation strategy, market share, or content marketing, the Traffic & Market tools can help you understand the lay of the land.
Let’s take a look at three examples to highlight Semrush’s features. This is by no means a full overview of these tools. As a brief exploration, it provides a sense of what kind of data you can gather with Semrush Traffic & Market to plug into your selected competitor analysis framework.
Overall Market Landscape Analysis Data
For overall market landscape data, we can begin with the Market Overview dashboard in the Traffic & Market Toolkit. Simply enter competitor domains, and the tool will return insights you can use to better understand the competitive landscape.
The Growth Quadrant is a great example of a competitive landscape. It helps you visualize the lay of the business terrain by showing you where each of your competitors stands over a given period and to one another. Let’s look at the data gathering process by examining the food delivery industry.
This graph depicts competitor movements from April 2025 to May 2025. With this particular landscape chart, it’s clear that Seamless, less of a household name than Uber Eats or DoorDash, stands out with consistently high traffic numbers and significant growth over the last month.
We might also consider the Market Summary section for information about competitor growth rates and market share. The Key Players and Market Size sections show the percentage of each player's market and the size of the overall market, respectively.
In April 2025, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) was 5.5B with a Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) of 1.1B. With the SAM about a fifth of the size of its TAM, this data tells us there’s still plenty of room for this market to grow.
DoorDash captured the lion’s share of traffic with 52% of total market traffic. And though Seamless has seen strong growth over the past month, it didn’t rank among the top three key players.
Using historical data, we can track market size and share over time, which provides an understanding of changes in the landscape. For example, here’s a look at the Market Summary for April 2022.
From this 2022 data, we learn that DoorDash was still in command of about half of the market traffic. However, Grubhub didn’t lag behind Uber Eats by such a large margin back then. With this new information, we might track the changes in market share month by month, or try to figure out what steps DoorDash or Uber Eats took to overcome the competition.
By 2025, the market had more than doubled compared to 2022. So, although DoorDash’s market share increased slightly in 2025, the total number of visits went up drastically.
Further down the Market Overview Dashboard, the Market Players chart shows which competitors dominate traffic channels—Direct, Search, Referral, Social, etc. Here’s a look at the competitors’ channel traffic in April 2025.
As the market leader, DoorDash took the top spot in overall visits and Direct traffic, but Uber Eats dominated Referral and Organic Search traffic.
Looking at the graph three years prior, in April 2022, however, shows a slightly different picture.
In 2022, we discovered Uber Eats overtook DoorDash in the Paid Search category by .8M. This historical data reveals that the bottom two players fared better in 2022. Seamless had 2 million fewer visits in 2025 than in 2022. Grubhub witnessed a loss of visits via Direct and Paid Search traffic. It’s worth diving into the causes behind these traffic dips.
Audience Landscape Analysis Data
For competitor audience data, the Traffic & Market Toolkit provides insights to help you understand your market’s audience and where it corresponds to each competitor. The Demographics dashboard offers the data you need to understand your competitors’ relationships to the market audience.
With the Audience charts, you can view the breakdown of the market audience among competitors in terms of age and sex. For example, the majority of the online food delivery audience skews slightly toward females, and the majority of audience members are in the 25–44 age range.
Looking closer, we can gather data about individual competitors to track and make comparisons. For example, notice the blue bars in the graph belonging to Uber Eats. The portion of the audience that uses Uber Eats skews older, as indicated by its leading positions in the 45-65+ age group, and falls behind its competitors in the 18-44 group.
The Audience Overlap dashboard provides useful data about how competitors’ audiences overlap. This graph shows the audience overlap among DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Seamless in April 2025.
DoorDash, represented by the large green circles, has the largest number of unique visitors. Uber Eats is the only competitor with an audience that is close in size. DoorDash and Uber Eats also have the largest overlapping audience.
Product Landscape Analysis Data
When it comes to the competitive landscape as it relates to products and services, both the Top Pages Dashboard and EyeOn (in the Traffic & Market Toolkit) can provide a wealth of data.
The Top Pages Dashboard lists your competitors’ most popular web pages and provides filtering options to bring the most useful data to the forefront. Here’s a look at DoorDash’s Top Pages report for April 2025.
The highlighted page toward the bottom of the table allows DoorDash users to benefit from Lyft, providing insight into the company’s growth strategy. A competitive strike against Uber, this partnership landing page yielded more than 408,000 visits in one month.
Each page also offers a dropdown view with a graph revealing the sources of the page’s traffic. We can see that DoorDash didn’t use paid resources to encourage traffic to the DoorDash-Lyft partnership page, as most traffic came from Direct and Organic Search.
From this view, we can visualize the traffic sources for this page and better understand how Uber Eats markets this product. While direct traffic is most common, the amount of referral traffic coming to the page is also high. This suggests strong partnerships are part of their marketing strategy.
Finally, the EyeOn dashboard tracks your competitors, providing an organized view of their marketing trends and a timeline of their recent Google Search Ads, Blog Posts, New Pages, and Social Media.
The Timeline offers an overall view of competitors' products and which ones get the most promotion. For example, DoorDash recently ran a Google Search ad to promote its sightseeing tours in Casablanca, Morocco.
From the EyeOnTimeline, you can navigate directly to the landing page to see how they promote a particular product or service.
EyeOn will also send you a weekly email detailing your competitors’ ad, blog, and social media activity.
With the combination of the trends graphs, Timeline, and weekly emails, you can closely watch your competitors' new product and service rollouts, their most popular promos, and trends in their marketing activity.
Your Competitive Landscape Report
Once you’ve uncovered your competitors, selected a framework for analyzing the competition, and gathered data, you’ll need to organize your findings. Again, understanding the lay of the land for strategic planning is the entire point of the competitive landscape analysis.
This often involves sharing your findings with other stakeholders. A variety of tools exist to help you share your findings. For simple analyses, a simple spreadsheet or a whiteboard may work.
For other research, you may want to use a tool like Google Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio) or Tableau.
Either way, because landscape analyses focus on relationships between businesses, it can help to study and present your findings visually.
Don’t be afraid to get creative!
Often, looking at data in different ways helps draw better conclusions and explain your findings to stakeholders with more clarity.
