Mason

Field guide · 4 markets · 1,300+ named relationships

How to find your competitors' customers,
and how many you can date

What we found mining competitors' public customers in four markets, what dated them, and what did not.

Read the findings Get the deal ledger
Research run Sep to Oct 2026By Shreyan Rajesh

Mason / Research · Published 9 November 2026

1,300+named relationships with competitors' customers, in four markets
About a thirdof 317 deals in one market carried a public date
21 of 338named customers in another appeared on a page dated in the last 12 months; 2 were clearly new wins

To find your competitors' customers, read the competitors' own pages first: case studies, testimonials, partner directories and review sites. Names come easily: we found more than 1,300 named relationships in four markets. Dates do not. About a third of one market's deals carried a date, and in another only 2 of 338 named customers were clearly new wins.

THE QUESTION

Who buys from your competitors,
and when did they buy?

A competitor's customer is the closest thing to a proven buyer you can find in public. The name tells you who. Only a date tells you whether they are still in the market, or whether something before the purchase could have told you. Some of the purchases in our report on what comes before a B2B purchase came from deal sets like these.

HOW WE CHECKED

Four markets, one research run each.
Names first, then dates.

Every count below comes from that run's own log. Competitors and customers are not named on this page.

Retention agenciesEcommerce bookkeepingRobotic handsFinance software

01 / The hit rates

Names come easily. Dates do not.

In every market the competitors had published plenty of customers. What changed from market to market was how many of them came with a date, and how many were real purchases.

109

orders, deployments or pilots in one market

30

dated to the month or better (19 by a date other than the page's own publish date)

One research run per market. Found is not verified, except where the row says so.
MarketFoundDated or verified
Email and SMS retention agencies317 deals found by handAbout a third dated from a public page. Adding review-site rows, 143 of 362.
Ecommerce bookkeeping firms221 names in the first batch25 of 291 dated to about 6 months; 178 of 292 had any dated source, mostly the date of a page naming them as a client by then. In a later check of 20 deals, all 10 competitor deals stood on two or more records.
Robotic hands and grippers449 relationships at 431 organisations109 were orders, deployments or pilots. 43 of those had any date; 30 to the month or better, 19 of them by a date other than the page's publish date.
Finance software for groups of companies338 named customers197 had any date. 21 appeared on a page dated in the last 12 months, and 2 were clearly new wins.

02 / Where to look

Where the names and the dates live

The best sources were the competitor's own pages and the sites its customers review it on. A customer that left a competitor for you is a rip-and-replace; the same pages show who might.

31 start dates

Case studies.

Some say when the work began in plain words. One competitor's own site gave 31 start dates. One testimonials page named 33 clients.

42 of 42

Review sites.

A project-length field gave a start month and an end, or "ongoing", on every review we read. Archived copies took 42 readable reviews to 69.

Start bound

"For the past 6 years".

A referral page's claim plus the page's first archived copy gives a latest start date: archived in August 2024, so begun by August 2018.

To the year

Year-in-review posts.

One competitor's favourite-projects post dated about 20 brands to the year.

Partners

App partner directories.

In bookkeeping, an accounting app's partner directory carried reviews with a date, a reviewer and a company.

0 of 10

A web search per deal.

It dated none of 10. In another market's check, three dates came from the third party in the deal: the warehouse, the lender, the integrator.

03 / Competitors first

Find the competitors before their customers

You can only mine the customers of competitors you have found. In each market we measured, most candidates fell away once someone read what they actually sell.

1,861

search results in one market

20

competitors kept to mine

138 kept

Ecommerce bookkeeping.

1,861 search results gave 313 firms. 138 were kept, 30 scored by hand, and the top 20 locked.

74 of 491

Energy-site controllers.

518 searches and 203 sites read gave 126 scored and a US pool of 74, then a top 20.

18 of 33

A second blind check.

In finance software, a second reviewer who could not see the first rejected 18 of the 33 products the first had called direct competitors.

04 / Dating traps

A date on the page is not always the date of the deal

What the page shows

A year in the copy, a date in the page's metadata, the day the story was posted. Each looks like a deal date.

In robotic hands, the most common date on a deal was the page's publish date: 24 of 65 date entries, against 11 order dates.

What to check

A brand's founding year ("since 2008") is its history, not the relationship. A test set refused three of them.

Metadata lies: one competitor stamped every case study with the same month; another carried a video's upload date.

Stories get re-published: a 2023 story came back in 2026. Namesakes and wrong products show up too. Read the proof.

"Results in 90 days" is a claim about results, not how long the relationship ran.

05 / Honest notes

Limits of this guide

  • Four markets, one run each. The rates differ by market; treat them as examples, not norms.
  • Found is not verified. Only the bookkeeping check confirmed deals on two records. A stricter pass in robotic hands, which classified 3,197 of 3,242 competitor page addresses first, has 32 candidate pages and no verified deal yet.
  • Review sites block reads. Past page 1, live review pages refused automated reads, so archived copies were the only door.

Mistakes we caught

  • The same review twice. A review site renumbered its reviews between two page layouts; counting by number alone double-counted 9.
  • An archive that stopped answering. After about 20 lookups in parallel, the archive went quiet. 74 lookups stayed unconfirmed, which is not the same as undated. Pace it.
  • A parser that found nothing. The first live reader found 0 reviews because the page marked them differently. Check a count against the page before trusting it.

06 / Takeaway

The deal ledger

One row per competitor and customer, with the date kept apart from the words that carry it, and a second record before you call it verified. It works the same for an agency or a market-entry consultant mapping a client's market.

Download the deal ledger (CSV)

The counts on this page: hit-rate data (CSV).

Finding competitors' customers
  1. 01

    List the competitors first, and read what each one sells before you keep it.

  2. 02

    Read every case study, testimonial and partner page, not just the first page of an index.

  3. 03

    Check review sites for a project length, and their archived copies for older reviews.

  4. 04

    Write the date kind next to the date: started, ordered, delivered, announced or published.

  5. 05

    Keep the exact words that carry the date. If you cannot quote it, it is not a date.

  6. 06

    Find a second record before you call a deal verified, ideally from the third party in it.

Want your competitors' customers mapped?

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