Competitor Keywords: 75,659 Rows and Not One in Persian

The test

We called dataforseo_labs/google/ranked_keywords/live with no country filter, sorted by search volume, on 19 August 2026. Each call cost about $0.013, so the whole exercise ran under six cents. This is the same endpoint sitting behind the competitor keyword tool we sell, which is the reason we are willing to publish what it does.

The four domains were picked to be as different from each other as possible: a giant Iranian retailer, a Persian tech publication, an Iranian hosting company, and our own site, which is small and carries some English content.

What came back

Look at the third row again. An Iranian hosting provider, and the single most important keyword the tool could find for it is the meaning of the word spyware in Urdu, at rank 46. The row below it was fqdnとは in Japanese, rank 102. The tool located that company's pages in Urdu and Japanese search results and served them up as competitor intelligence.

Zoomit tells the same story at a different scale. Thirty-four thousand rows, topped by poco x7 and xiaomi 14t pro at ranks 48 to 68, while the Persian phrases that actually carry its traffic are nowhere in the list.

Three things going wrong at once

The coverage gap comes first, and it is larger than most people assume. Across the full Google Ads location list, which runs to 262,074 rows, exactly one carries the country code IR, and it is a province rather than the country. We measured that separately last month. Absent local data, the response is then padded with international observations instead of returning nothing, so an English page that drifted to rank 83 in the United States arrives labelled as a legitimate competitor keyword.

Sorting by volume finishes the job. Global terms carry six-figure volumes and Persian ones carry three figures, which pushes everything that matters to the bottom of a list nobody scrolls. None of this is specific to Iran, incidentally. Any market a provider has not instrumented will behave the same way, and the failure will look identical: plausible, populated, useless. Iran is simply a case where we can prove it.

The approach that does work here

Come at it from the keyword rather than the domain. Write down the phrases your business actually gets paid for, pull the live Google result for each one, and read who is standing there. Google introduces you to your competitors, instead of a database that has never seen your market.

That is why our competitor comparison page asks for a domain and a keyword rather than a domain alone. The distinction is not cosmetic: one reads from a stored index, the other fetches the result at the moment you ask.

Something else worth knowing, which rarely gets said out loud. Your search competitor is usually not your business competitor. A travel agency may find the top three results for its money term occupied by a price comparison site and a national app, neither of which has ever competed with it commercially. Budget spent fighting the shop down the road is budget spent in a battle the other side is not attending.

When this criticism does not apply

If your audience sits outside Iran, or your site is in English, the same tool works properly and the data is real. Our own domain returned seven rows and all seven were accurate: English phrases we genuinely rank for, at positions 7 to 25. The list is short because our English content is thin, not because the instrument is broken.

So the rule is narrow. International domain in, trustworthy answer out. Persian domain in, do not believe the table.

We also owe a correction. The help text on our own tool says the result for a mostly-Persian domain is "usually zero". Yesterday's test shows that description is incomplete: it is usually not zero, it is full and irrelevant. We are rewriting that sentence, because a user can recognise an empty result on their own and cannot recognise a populated wrong one.

Questions people ask

How do you actually find a competitor's keywords?

For the Iranian market, start from your own keyword list and pull the real Google result for each phrase to see which domains occupy it. The reverse method, feeding a competitor domain into an international tool, produces the table our test showed you cannot rely on.

Which keyword research tools are worth using?

The international database family tested here, Iranian tools that observe Persian results directly, and your own Search Console performance report, which is the only free and unmediated source of the three. Search Console will not show you a competitor's keywords, but it describes yours more accurately than any tool can.

What does keyword research involve?

Finding the phrases your audience really types, then judging how realistic reaching the top of each one is. A keyword is simply whatever a person types into Google, and the fuller definition sits in what a keyword is. The step-by-step method is in our guide to Persian keyword research; this article covers only the competitor half of it.

Try it on your own competitor

Feed one Persian competitor domain into whichever tool you pay for and read the first ten rows. If two genuine Persian money phrases for that business are not among them, the tool has no data for this market and the subscription is not buying you anything. When we build a site that has to rank inside Iran, we pull the competitor set out of live Google results rather than out of a table that has never looked at the country.

Measured 19 August 2026. If the provider's coverage changes, we will rerun the test and update the figures.