How to find out what technology a website uses

None of this is clever or secret. A website has to hand its code to every visitor, so anything running in the browser is visible to anyone who looks. The skill is not in finding the signals, it is in knowing which ones mean something.

The platform: what it is built on

Right-click a page and choose View Page Source, then look at the paths in the file references. Each platform leaves an unmistakable fingerprint:

• /wp-content/ or /wp-includes/ — WordPress, still roughly two in five sites.
• cdn.shopify.com — Shopify.
• /_next/static/ — Next.js, so a custom build by a developer rather than a page builder.
• static.parastorage.com — Wix. squarespace.com assets — Squarespace.
• A <meta name="generator"> tag, which often simply names the platform and version.

What it actually tells you

Less than people think about quality, and quite a lot about budget and agility. A Wix site usually means the owner built it themselves or paid a few hundred pounds, and that changing it is easy but the ceiling is low. A custom Next.js build means somebody spent real money and there is a developer involved, so expect the technical basics to be handled. WordPress tells you almost nothing on its own, because it spans a £200 template and a £50,000 build.

Analytics and pixels: what they are measuring

Search the page source for these. They tell you more about a competitor’s marketing than their homepage copy ever will:

• Google Analytics 4 (gtag, G- followed by letters and numbers). Baseline. They are at least measuring traffic.
• Google Ads conversion tag (AW- followed by digits). They are, or recently were, paying for clicks and tracking what those clicks do.
• Meta Pixel (fbq, connect.facebook.net). Facebook or Instagram advertising.
• Google Tag Manager (googletagmanager.com/gtm). Somebody who knows what they are doing set it up, because GTM is not something an owner installs by accident.
• Hotjar, Clarity or similar. They are watching session recordings, which means somebody is actively working on conversion rate.
• A chat widget or booking system. Tells you how leads arrive and how quickly they expect to respond.

The absence is often the finding. A competitor with a Google Ads tag and no analytics is spending money without measuring it. A competitor with nothing at all is flying blind, which usually means their marketing is habit rather than strategy. That is useful, because it tells you how quickly they are likely to react to anything you do.

The SEO signals worth reading

• Their sitemap, at /sitemap.xml. This is the most underrated one: it lists every page they think matters. You can see their whole content strategy, how many location pages they run, and whether they have a blog that is actually maintained.
• Their robots.txt, which sometimes reveals staging areas, admin paths, or a deliberate block on AI crawlers.
• Structured data (application/ld+json). Whether they have LocalBusiness markup, review markup, FAQ markup. Missing schema on a competitor is an opening.
• Title tags across their key pages. If two carry the same title, they are competing with themselves and one of those pages is effectively invisible.

How to tell whether the site is actually maintained

This is the question most people forget to ask, and it changes the whole picture. A competitor who looks formidable but has not touched the site in two years is not the threat they appear to be.

• The lastmod dates in their sitemap. If everything says the same date three years ago, nothing has changed since.
• Blog post dates. A blog that stopped in 2023 tells you the marketing budget stopped in 2023.
• Copyright year in the footer. Crude, but a footer still saying 2022 usually means nobody is looking after it.
• Whether prices have moved. If their published prices are years old, they are either very stable or not paying attention.

Three ways people misread all this

• Assuming a big stack means a big result. Plenty of sites carry six tracking scripts and convert nothing. Tools are evidence of intent, not of success.
• Copying the stack instead of the strategy. Installing what they use will not give you what they get. What matters is what they are doing with it.
• Looking once. A single snapshot is a photograph. What is genuinely useful is the change: a new pricing page, a pixel that suddenly appears, twenty new location pages. That is a competitor making a move, and it is visible before the results are.

You can do every check above by hand in about twenty minutes per competitor. Competitor Watch does it in one pass and, more usefully, keeps looking, so when a rival changes something you hear about it from the tool rather than from a customer.