Find a sharper position in what competitors already say

Competitor pages are a record of what other companies chose to say in public. They are not proof that those sentences are true, and they are not wording for you to reuse. For a product you have already shipped, use them to see which audience everyone claims. Then write one sentence only your product can carry, and check it against something a real person did recently.

Open a worksheet with six columns: name, audience they name, headline, promise they repeat, situation they skip, and the action on the main button. Fill five rows from pages a buyer would actually open, plus one row for the current workaround. That workaround is often a spreadsheet, a shared doc, or skipping the task.

Find the set from the job, not from brands you wish you resembled. Search the phrase your user would type. An agent can retrieve candidate pages with Exa search. You can also search by hand and paste the pages yourself. Then collect lines that are in market now. Meta's Ad Library shows ads associated with a Page. The Google Ads Transparency Center shows ads tied to a verified advertiser. A live ad means the company is willing to say that line in public. It does not report who saw it, whether it was profitable, or whether the product delivers it.

Read the audience column. If most of the rows say "for teams," that phrase is the crowded center. You can serve a team later. Leading with the same phrase makes the page interchangeable. Look for the person the pages skip: often someone who does the job alone, on a deadline, with the old workaround still open.

Taking a headline you like is not a test of demand. The line can be wrong for your product and dull to the person you hoped to help. A useful check sounds ordinary: ask what they opened the last time they had to finish the job. If they cannot recall a recent time, you are talking to the wrong person, or the job is rarer than the category language suggests.

**Hypothetical example.** Ledgerline drafts an invoice from the notes on a finished job for a solo electrician. The five rivals lead with team timesheets and project profitability, and their buttons say "Book a demo." None describe someone writing the invoice in the truck after the last call, from texts and photos. The candidate line is: "For electricians who invoice from today's job notes, Ledgerline turns those notes into a draft you can send before you leave the site." A dashboard product for agencies cannot say that and stay honest. The line is still a hypothesis until an electrician describes the last job that way.

Hold the sentence against three checks before you redesign the page:

• Could the first rival put it on their hero without changing the product? If they could, narrow the person or the situation.
• Can your product do that action this week, on a real job, without a feature you have not shipped?
• When you say it to someone in that situation, do they correct a detail you can use, or do they change the subject?

Keep their exact wording in the sheet so the pattern stays visible. Leave it there. Ordinary words will overlap. Their headline should not become yours, because that turns the page into a later copy of a claim you have not tested.

Here is my positioning worksheet and five competitor excerpts I pasted. Do not copy their headlines or slogans into options for me. List promises that appear in at least three excerpts, the audience words they share, and the situation they never mention. Propose three sentences for the audience I named. Each sentence must name a person, a recent situation, and an action my product already does. Mark any sentence my product cannot do this week. End with five questions about the last real job. None of the questions should ask for praise.

**Finish rule.** You are done when one sentence is on the page, a rival's current hero cannot say it truthfully, and you have notes from five conversations in which each person described the last time they did that job. Until those notes exist, keep the sentence in the worksheet.

A scan will not settle whether the sentence is true. It reads the public page the way a cold visitor does and names the largest gap in that static view. How to test an idea before you build more is about checking demand against behavior, and landing page best practices shows how a specific audience appears in the first screen. Put the sentence in the hero, then use the free scan at launchbuddy.com/scan to see whether a stranger can tell who the page is for.