The privacy policy secret to find your competitor’s customers 🥕

7 quick ways to "harvest" a list of your competitors' customers... with an easy Google search (aka Google Dorking)

Today, I'll show you a cost-free way to find your competitors' customers using Google searches, with a technique called “Google Dorking”.

🕸️ How it works:

TL;DR - privacy policies.

Companies often mention their B2B vendors in their privacy policy, thanks to regulations like GDPR. For example, if our competitor is Hubspot, there’s a good chance that many Hubspot’s customers are talking about the fact that they are using Hubspot in their privacy policy.

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👉 This means that we can ethically identify our competitors’ customers by scanning each and every privacy policy on the web.

Our tool? Google. It's already scanned the internet for us 🙃

🎁 7 Google search queries that work:

With Google, we can find all privacy policies where the name of our competitor appears, except the privacy policy of the competitor itself.

Simply copy & paste each of these to Google (fill in the placeholders):

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1. intext:"[competitor name]" intext:"services we use" -site:[competitor website]

2. intext:"[competitor name]" intext:"share your information with" -site:[competitor website]

3. "privacy policy" intext:"we use [competitor name]" -site:[competitor website]

4. intext:"[competitor name]" filetype:pdf -site:[competitor website]

5. intext:"[competitor name]" “third party”+“service​" inurl:"privacy" -site:[competitor website]

6. "personal data processed" [competitor name] -site:[competitor website]

7. “[competitor name] experience required” -site:[competitor website]

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Casually spilling the beans

For example, let’s say we develop a Slack alternative. Here’s what we should search:

1. intext:"Slack" intext:"services we use" -site:slack.com

2. intext:"Slack" intext:"share your information with" -site:slack.com

3. "privacy policy" intext:"we use Slack" -site:slack.com

4. intext:"Slack" filetype:pdf -site:slack.com

5. intext:"Slack" “third party”+“service​" inurl:"privacy" -site:slack.com

6. "personal data processed" Slack -site:slack.com

7. “Slack experience required” -site:slack.com

Don’t mind me I’m just spilling the beans here

Then, visit those privacy policies in the search results, and CTRL+F your way into compiling your competitor’s customer list.

Using these search queries, I found that:

• Matomo mentions using HubSpot;

• InterNations mentions using Salesforce;

• Tuqqi mentions using Sentry;

• OneIQ mentions using Slack;

• Deepwatch mentions using ZoomInfo;

• Responsive.io mentions using Grammarly;

• Dune mentions using Zendesk;

• …and hundreds (!) more.

What a hell of a multi-cloud. Also, beans.

That’s it! Give Google Dorking a try. While success is not guaranteed, it's worth the shot.

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P.S. Set up Google Alerts for: "competitor name" "privacy policy”.

P.P.S. Google might ask if you're a robot when using these search queries. Be honest.

See you next week ✌️

Tom