Gathering Information about Competitive Companies to Analyze them
23-4-2018 | IslamWeb
Question:
Assalamo AlaykumI m working in the digital marketing in the SEO( search engine optimization) and make advertisements Ads in Adwords. My question is very simple, I use competition intelligence tool to analyze the competitor's sites in search engines like google and etc..For ex: spy on their Keywords and see their top organic keywords, the benefit ones that bring traffic and copy them for example in my contents for better rankings.see their backlinks profiles, that means to see where they get Links from other sites and try to extract some of them.Check the advertisements of the competitors in Google Adwords and analyze how they are successful, the last seen and for how long time, the keywords that the competitors they used and much more.Nowadays, all the companies in the digital marketing used these kinds of tools in order to analyze the competition. is that considered as spying in the Islam and is haram to do that, please check this link, u can find out more about the Tool that I m speaking about: https://www.semrush.com/features/organic-research/there are many features one of them is Organic research. otherwise, you can go to https://www.semrush.com, then put your website in the search bar and you can see more how it works. The tool will give all the details of your website.this video is a short description of how it works too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkwpkSXGWbQ
Answer:
All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad 
is His slave and Messenger.
It appears –Allah knows best –that there is no harm in gathering information about competitive companies and analyzing them, and the like, and that this is not considered as forbidden spying, as long as this is about disclosed and known matters. This is permissible if it is done for the purpose of benefit and fair competition, provided that this neither leads to the violation of privacy nor to the transgression of people’s rights.
The principle about this, is that the forbidden spying is in matters that are hidden and non-disclosed, and when it is done with the intention of doing evil or inflicting harm.
Al-Khattaabi said in his book Ghareeb Al-hadeeth: “Spying is searching the hidden matters and affairs of the people. This is mostly said when one intends evil (or harm).” This was also said by other scholars.
People from the past until now continue to monitor each other (trying to know about the methods and ways) in trade and in the methods of profiting. Therefore, it is not strange or disapproved that traders investigate the reasons of success of their peers within their field of specialty, in order to benefit from their experience in trade. There is no harm in doing so, as long as this is within the rulings of the Sharee’ah and its limits.
Allah knows best.