👋 Hey, I'm Shehu AbdulGaniy. Welcome to SaaS SEO Insights, where every week I dive deep into SEO and AEO strategies that B2B SaaS startups are using to drive signups from organic and AI search, so you can steal what works and skip what doesn't.

Scribe ran a survey asking about 100 existing customers a simple question: "What were you using before Scribe?"

If you don't know Scribe, it's a process documentation tool. You hit "record," walk through a task on your screen, and it generates a step-by-step guide with screenshots, titles, and formatted steps.

So you'd expect customers to name tools like Process Street, Loom, or Whale.

Some of them said Google Docs.

Not a dedicated documentation tool. Not anything in the same G2 category. Google Docs.

I learned this from a conversation with Jakub Rudnik, formerly the Head of Content at Scribe. Jakub grew Scribe's blog traffic from zero to 40,000 organic visitors. Before Scribe, he led content at G2, where he grew blog traffic from 50,000 to 1.55 million.

According to Jakub, Scribe "sits in between a bunch of traditional categories." It overlaps with SOP software, product documentation tools, and customer success platforms. It was carving out a new space. And because of that, traditional competitor research completely missed where their users were actually coming from.

This pattern exists in almost every SaaS category.

If you're a CRM, you automatically think of HubSpot, Salesforce, and Close. But some of your potential customers are managing their entire pipeline in Google Sheets. For them, Google Sheets is your competitor.

If you're a project management tool, you're watching Asana and Monday. But some of your best prospects run projects out of Notion docs and Slack threads.

The competitors your customers actually compared you to before choosing your product are usually different from the ones you'd find through traditional research.

Most SaaS companies build their competitor list from G2 and Capterra categories, competitor analysis in Semrush or Ahrefs, and branded keyword bids. All of that surfaces the obvious competitors in your category.

But Google Docs wasn't in any G2 category comparison with Scribe. It wasn't in any competitive analysis report. Yet real customers were using it to write step-by-step guides before they discovered Scribe.

Jakub put it this way: Traditional competitor research completely missed where their users were actually coming from because Scribe didn't fit neatly into one existing category.

Hidden competitors reveal keywords with real buyer intent and almost no competition, because nobody in your category is targeting them.

If Scribe had targeted only keywords related to their known competitors, they would have gone after terms like "Process Street alternatives," "Loom alternatives," and "best SOP software." Those keywords have volume and clear intent, but they only reach people who already know what category they're shopping in.

The people using Google Docs to write process guides weren't searching for "SOP software." They were searching for things like "how to create a step-by-step guide" or "Google Docs alternatives for documentation."

They described their problem in the language of the tool they were stuck with. Not in the language of the category Scribe belonged to.

Jakub's team acted on this. They wrote a "Google Docs alternatives" page and positioned Scribe as an option, even though Scribe isn't a Google Docs competitor in any traditional sense.

It converted because the intent was right. Those searchers weren't looking for a better doc editor. They were looking for a better way to do the thing they'd been forcing Google Docs to do.

Now, a fair objection: these hidden competitor pages typically have lower search volume than category keywords. A "Google Docs alternatives for documentation" page isn't going to match the volume of "best SOP software." That's true. But the conversion rate on these pages tends to be significantly higher because the intent is so specific. And when you stack five or six hidden competitor pages on top of each other, the combined volume and conversions add up to a channel that your category competitors don't even know exists.

In traditional SEO, hidden competitors reveal overlooked keywords. In AI search, they reveal overlooked prompts.

If Scribe only optimizes for AI queries like "best Process Street alternative" or "top SOP tools," they only show up when someone already knows the category.

But what about the person asking ChatGPT: "How do I create a step-by-step process guide without manually taking screenshots?"

Or someone asking Perplexity: "What tool makes documenting SOPs easier than doing it in Google Docs?"

Those are money prompts. And they come directly from understanding your hidden competitors.

People using workarounds don't search for your category. They describe their problem using the language of whatever tool they're currently stuck with. If you don't know what those workaround tools are, you can't optimize for the prompts that mention them.

This doesn't mean traditional competitor keywords stop mattering. It means hidden competitor research gives you an additional layer of demand capture that most SaaS companies are completely ignoring.

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You ask your customers.

Almost every company does some form of customer research, but very few connect the findings to their content and SEO strategy. That connection is where the real value lives.

At Your Content Mart, customer research is one of the first things we do when working with a new client.

Here are the questions that consistently surface hidden competitors:

Question 1: "What were you using before you found us?"

This is the question that revealed Google Docs for Scribe. It tells you where your customers were before they knew your product existed. The answers will surprise you.

Question 2: "What would you use if our product were no longer available?"

This reveals not just where customers came from, but where they'd go back to. It uncovers which alternatives feel interchangeable to your customers, regardless of category.

Question 3: "What did you evaluate before choosing us?"

This surfaces the tools your customers actively compared you against during their buying decision. Sometimes those tools are direct competitors. Sometimes they're products you've never considered.

Question 4: "What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across us?"

This gives you the language your customers use to describe their pain, which is exactly what they type into Google or ask an AI tool. If they say "I needed a faster way to onboard new hires" instead of "I needed SOP software," that tells you where your real keyword and prompt opportunities are.

You can run these as a formal survey or ask them in 1-on-1 customer interviews. Either works.

Once you have the answers:

Step 1: Map the hidden competitors to keyword opportunities. If customers say they were using Google Docs or Notion, write a "Google Docs or Notion alternatives" page. You can also write comparison posts. These pages convert because the intent matches.

Step 2: Translate those into AI search prompts. Take the workaround tools and the problem language your customers gave you, and build those into the content you want AI tools to pull from. "How to [solve problem] without [workaround tool]" is a money prompt formula that works across almost every SaaS category.

Step 3: Repeat every 6 months. Your customer base evolves. New users come from new places. The hidden competitors shift over time.

Hope you found this helpful.

Got any thoughts or questions on this? 

Let me know by replying to this email.

To your startup success,

Shehu AbdulGaniy
Founder, Your Content Mart

P.S: If you found this week's email valuable, share it with a SaaS founder or marketer who's only tracking the competitors they can see on G2. They're probably missing the ones that matter most.