Yes. An SEO company can track a competitor’s search performance on an ongoing basis, and most established agencies treat this as a standard part of their service. The important thing to understand is what “tracking” actually means here. An agency cannot see inside a competitor’s analytics account or marketing reports. What it can do is monitor the public and modeled signals that reveal how a competitor is performing in search, and watch those signals change over time.
What an SEO company can track
The most common starting point is visibility, sometimes called share of voice. Using rank tracking tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush, an agency builds a keyword list that matters to your business and then monitors where competing sites rank for those terms on desktop and mobile. Instead of looking at a single keyword, share of voice combines many rankings into one figure, so you can see whether a competitor is gaining or losing ground across the whole set.
Keyword overlap and gap analysis is a second area. These tools can identify which sites rank for a large share of the same keywords you target, which often surfaces competitors you had not manually identified. Gap reports then show terms a competitor ranks for that you do not, which is useful for planning content.
Backlink monitoring is a third. Tools maintain large indexes of links and refresh them frequently, so an agency can watch when a competitor earns new links, loses old ones, or runs a noticeable link building push. Finally, content moves can be tracked by watching new and updated pages, new ranking URLs, and shifts in the topics a competitor is winning. Some tools have also added monitoring of brand mentions inside AI search results, which is a newer area worth asking about.
How ongoing tracking works
Tracking is most useful when it is set up once and then reviewed on a schedule rather than checked at random. A typical setup involves choosing a defined competitor set, defining the keyword universe, and establishing a baseline. After that the agency reports on movement, usually monthly or quarterly, alongside your own performance so the numbers have context. Most reporting platforms can produce competitor comparisons automatically once the lists are configured.
The honest limits of competitor data
Competitor tracking is genuinely useful, but it is not exact, and a good agency will say so. Traffic and keyword volume figures from third party tools are estimates produced by models and clickstream data, not measured numbers. Accuracy tends to be better for larger sites and weaker for smaller ones, and it can vary noticeably from one tool to another.
The practical takeaway is to trust the direction more than the decimal. These tools are reliable for spotting trends and relative differences, such as one site holding far more referring domains than another, and less reliable as a precise count. An agency cannot see a competitor’s conversion rate, revenue, ad spend, or true profit, so search visibility is only one slice of how that business is actually doing. Data can also age quickly, since a single algorithm update can change the picture, which is why fresh exports matter.
What to ask an agency
Ask which competitors they would track and why those, since the right set is not always your obvious business rivals. Ask which tools they use, how often they report, and how they present competitor data next to your own results. Ask how they handle the gap between estimated and confirmed numbers, and what they would actually do with a finding, for example reacting to a competitor’s new content push or link gain. A capable SEO company will frame competitor tracking as an early warning system and a source of ideas, not as a guarantee that you will always know exactly what a competitor is doing.