The global affiliate marketing industry is projected to reach $31.7 billion by 2031, with the United States being the largest affiliate hub worldwide. There are still plenty of opportunities for affiliate marketing in 2026, and you can get a head start by analyzing the competition to adopt the best strategies and fill the market gaps.
Speaking of affiliate competitors analysis, you can do it much faster with spy tools, including topic, keyword, and engagement research alongside every bit of data that can be tracked, collected, and analyzed. And it will only cost you a monthly subscription, possibly a few dozen dollars for an affiliate marketing competitor research toolkit.
To help you with competitor analysis, we analyzed the 17 best spy tools for affiliate marketing. Read on to get the one that matches your industry, goals, and budget.
Semrush
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 60,884,606 | 3.11 | 158.65 | 0.42 |
SEMrush is one of the most powerful competitor analysis tools on the market, widely used by SEO specialists, paid media teams, and affiliate marketers. The platform is organized into eight toolkits, each designed to provide deeper insights into competitor strategies.
With SEMrush, you can examine traffic, keywords, most effective pages, and even how AI tools view you and your competitors. Then you can use these insights to reverse-engineer and improve organic content and paid ads.
Ahrefs
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 10,038,486 | 5.72 | 475.82 | 0.33 |
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO and competitive intelligence platform, and one of the best tools for competitor analysis around organic performance, backlinks, and content strategies.
With Ahrefs, you can analyze competitors’ top pages, referring domains, anchor texts, outbound links, etc. The Rank Tracker feature allows you to monitor their keyword movements and get notified about new backlinks or content updates.
Meanwhile, Ahrefs Brand Radar is a standalone AI visibility tool that shows how brands appear in AI-driven search results and across YouTube and Reddit. With this knowledge, you can determine emerging players and dive into new trends early.
Similarweb
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 9,389,594 | 3.91 | 218.08 | 0.41 |
Similarweb is a market research platform and competitor analysis tool that shows how much traffic a website or app receives, where it comes from, and which devices dominate the audience. The platform also offers tools for paid ad analytics, sales strategies, SEO, GEO (what AI tools “thought” about a particular business), and more.
Likewise, Similarweb provides a comprehensive view of competitor marketing efforts and audience behavior, enabling data-driven decisions and reverse-engineering. You can also determine industry trends early on.
Flippa
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 1,366,330 | 6.38 | 309.21 | 0.36 |
Flippa is a marketplace for buying and selling digital assets, including websites and apps, providing a unique perspective that differs from other competitor analysis tools.
Instead of analyzing traffic and keywords, you can examine businesses in your niche with documented revenue, traffic history, and profit metrics:
- Spot profitable business models by analyzing sites that already earn via affiliate commissions, ads, or product sales
- Understand traffic sources and trends by analyzing listings that show where users come from and changes in traffic
- Reverse‑engineer marketing efforts based on which content categories and monetization tactics work
- Compare benchmarks to determine whether you have room to grow
SpyFu
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 432,366 | 6.12 | 280.19 | 0.34 |
SpyFu is one of the best SEO competitor analysis tools, digging into keywords, ad history, and competitive positioning. You can enter a competitor’s domain and see the keywords they rank for, both in organic search and paid campaigns, including search volume, difficulty, ranking history, and estimated traffic value.
Likewise, you can use SpyFu to uncover competitors’ Google Ads strategies, including keywords, ad copy, and spend history. At the same time, SpyFu’s reports highlight keyword overlaps and how multiple sites compete for attention.
Coschedule
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 398,753 | 4.31 | 186.11 | 0.48 |
CoSchedule is a project management platform for planning, publishing, and analyzing content performance across channels. While it’s not a traditional competitor analysis tool, it can help you learn from performance patterns.
With CoSchedule, you can measure your content performance and compare it with other publishers, analyzing which topics, headlines, and posting schedules perform best. Likewise, their Social Message Optimization provides timing and content suggestions to create trending content.
Buzzsumo
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 269,062 | 4.04 | 185.42 | 0.4 |
BuzzSumo is a content research and competitor analysis platform that helps understand what content performs best in a given niche. You can search for any topic, keyword, or competitor domain to see the top-performing content.
BuzzSumo allows you to see which competitor pages gain the most traction, track emerging popular topics, identify leading publishers in your niche, and monitor backlink activity. With this data, you’ll catch trends early and adjust your content plan accordingly.
HubSpot
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 38,946,452 | 15.17 | 1004.8 | 0.28 |
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and CRM platform best known for helping marketers manage customer relationships and automate marketing workflows. With HubSpot, you can understand how your audience interacts with your content, funnels, and campaigns.
Beyond internal analytics, HubSpot’s tools help you benchmark performance, monitor industry trends, and indirectly evaluate competitor behavior through shared digital ecosystems such as search, social, and email marketing. You can also see how different acquisition channels contribute to traffic and conversions.
SERanking
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 1,353,907 | 6.42 | 444.1 | 0.34 |
SERanking is an SEO and competitor research platform that helps analyze the current market landscape, including competitors’ performance. You can track popular keywords, monitor rankings in your niche, and audit sites of other publishers.
One of their best features is the backlink analysis. SERanking makes it easier to spot linking opportunities by showing exactly which sites link to your competitors. As a result, you can reach out to the same sites or discover hidden gems that haven’t been tapped by other popular publishers in your niche yet.
Awin (Previously ShareASale)
| Visits | PagePerVisit | TimeOnSite | BounceRate |
| 2,942,076 | 9.17 | 464.19 | 0.25 |
Awin is one of the industry’s oldest affiliate networks that you can use to analyze affiliate offers, commission structures, and monetization models.
While Awin is not one of the traditional competitor analysis tools, it provides detailed information on commission rates, EPCs, cookie durations, and promotional assets. The platform also provides access to creative assets, so you get a sense of the messaging and styles different merchants prefer.
7 More Competitor Analysis Tools That Are Worth Your Attention
The ten platforms above provide deep insights into competitors’ strategies, but there are still other tools worth trying. Below, we’ve listed seven additional platforms that can help you analyze competitors and improve your performance.
| Platform | How It Benefits Affiliates |
| GetResponse | GetResponse is not a traditional spying tool, but it’s still useful for funnel benchmarking. You can compare your email flows, automation logic, and lead capture strategies against common patterns. |
| Kit | Kit helps analyze how other publishers structure their newsletters, lead magnets, and lead flows. By examining successful cases, you can adapt and optimize your own funnels. |
| Sprout Social | Sprout Social is asocial competitor tracking tool that shows posting frequency, engagement rates, content formats, platform performance, and more. These insights let you fine-tune your own social strategy. |
| Buffer | Buffer is, in fact, a lighter version of Sprout, which you can use to spot competitors’ posting patterns and timing. |
| WordStream | Wordstream helps spy on competitors by revealing the keywords and paid search strategies they’re using in Google Ads and other PPC campaigns. Analyze competitors’ keyword performance, ad copy, and bidding trends to uncover trends early and avoid costly mistakes. |
| HypeAuditor | HypeAuditor helps spy on competitors’ influencer marketing strategies and analyze audience quality, engagement rates, and follower authenticity. You’ll see which creators your competitors work with and whether engagement is authentic or just bot traffic. |
| Visualping | Visualping tracks changes on competitors’ landing pages, pricing pages, and promo offers in real time. You will get alerts and see how other publishers change their headlines, CTAs, bonuses, or discounts. |
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Here’s why Profitise is a go-to choice for insurance and solar affiliates:
- The biggest pool of insurance and solar advertisers to sell your leads
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Join Profitise as an affiliate to grow your bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an affiliate competitor analysis tool in affiliate marketing?
A competitor analysis tool in affiliate marketing is software that helps track competitors’ promotional strategies, including their traffic sources, keywords, paid ads, etc.
What are the best spy tools for affiliate marketing?
The best competitor analysis tools include SEMrush, Ahrefs, SERanking, ShareASale, SpyFu, and Visualping.
How can I spy on a competitor?
Analyze traffic sources, keywords, ads, content, and funnels of other publishers. You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu. Track their landing page changes, email flows, and social engagement to understand what drives their conversions.
