The 'Steal Your Competitor's SEO With AI' Trick, Tested

A developer tested a viral AI workflow claiming to steal a competitor's SEO strategy in five minutes by analyzing their sitemap through ChatGPT. Running the method on rival helicone.ai, the engineer found the sitemap contained 4,946 URLs, but 70% were auto-generated template pages—including 25 instances of a model compared against itself—while only 117 were actual blog posts. The test concluded the AI-generated roadmap was a "mirage" because sitemaps reveal what a site published, not what content actually drives traffic or ranks.

Originally published on rikuq.com. Republished here for Dev.to's readers. This is the first post in a series I'm calling AI Slop, Tested . Twitter and LinkedIn are flooded with "I automated hard thing with AI, one click, 5 minutes, here's the exact workflow 👇" threads. Most of them are screenshots of a process that technically runs and produces something , dressed up as a result. So I'm going to actually run them. On real targets. With receipts. Then tell you what's true, what's hype, and whether the 5 minutes buys you anything. First up, the one that's been all over my feed: How to STEAL your competitor's SEO strategy with AI in 5 minutes. Step 1: find their sitemap. Step 2-3: download 3-5 sitemaps. Step 4: upload everything into ChatGPT/Claude. Step 5: build a 6-month SEO roadmap. I ran the full workflow on a real competitor of mine. Here's what happened. My target: helicone.ai — a legitimate rival in the LLM observability / gateway space I write about. I followed the tweet's steps exactly. Step 1-2 worked. helicone.ai/robots.txt lists the sitemap. sitemap.xml is a clean index pointing to sitemap-0.xml . No friction. The tweet is right that this part is trivial and public. Step 3 — download the URLs. The sitemap has 4,946 URLs . Right away, that's a problem the tweet doesn't mention, but hold that thought. Step 4 — cluster the topics. Bucketing the URLs by their top path the exact thing the "analyze these sitemaps" prompt does gives you this: | Path | URLs | Share | |---|---|---| /comparison/ | 3,459 | 70% | /llm-cost/ | 1,124 | 23% | /blog/ | 117 | 2% | /model/ , /stats/ , /changelog/ , other | 246 | 5% | Step 5 — the AI roadmap. Feed that to ChatGPT and it confidently tells you: "Helicone dominates two huge content clusters — model comparisons and LLM cost. To compete, build out your own comparison and cost-calculator content at scale." Sounds like strategy. It's a mirage. Here's why. The tweet's method counts all 4,946 URLs as "content." But look at what's actually in the two big buckets. The /comparison/ pages are auto-generated from a template — every model crossed with every other model. How do I know? Because the set includes pages like: /comparison/claude-2-on-anthropic-vs-claude-2-on-anthropic That's Claude 2 compared against itself . There are 25 of these exact self-vs-self pages in the sitemap — a model matched with an identical copy of itself. No human wrote those. It's a for loop that forgot a = check. The /llm-cost/ pages are the same idea: one templated price page per provider/model, e.g. /llm-cost/provider/anthropic/model/claude%203%20opus . Useful as a reference table, but it's a database dump, not a content strategy. Strip the programmatic stuff and helicone's actual written content is 117 blog posts — not 4,946. The tweet's method inflated their footprint by ~40x and called it "domination." Here's the core lie. A sitemap tells you what a site published . It says nothing about what works . Those 3,459 comparison pages? Google may have indexed 200 of them and ignored the rest. They might pull 50,000 visits a month or near zero. The sitemap cannot tell you, and neither can the AI reading it. Programmatic comparison pages are exactly the kind of thin, templated content a real one I checked was 382 words of mostly boilerplate that Google's recent updates have been demoting . So the tweet's "build comparison content at scale" advice could be telling you to copy the part of their strategy that's actively bleeding out. You'd never know, because you're reasoning over a list of URLs with no performance data attached. A 4,946-URL sitemap is roughly 300KB of text. Paste that into ChatGPT and you blow past the window it can faithfully reason over. It won't error — it'll just silently analyze the first chunk and summarize that, and you have no idea which 80% it dropped. I learned this the hard way on a different project: hand a model a long list and ask it to count, and it'll hand you a confident number that's wrong. Same failure here. Here's everything the "5-minute" method is structurally blind to: That list is SEO strategy. The sitemap has none of it. Notice the workflow is "free." That's the tell. The free input a public sitemap is the worthless half. The half that actually tells you a competitor's strategy — real traffic and keyword data — costs money. A rank tracker like Ahrefs or Semrush, with API access, is what turns a URL list into intelligence. The honest version of the workflow looks like this: Even on my own young, low-traffic site, Google Search Console shows me per-page data a sitemap never could: my Portkey-vs-Helicone comparison sits at 51 impressions / position 8.5, my LLM FinOps explainer at 28 / position 5.1, and my Claude Code review at 30 impressions but a buried position 20.9. Three pages, three completely different stories — invisible in a sitemap, obvious in five minutes of real data. The claim | "Steal your competitor's full SEO strategy in 5 minutes with AI + their sitemap." | What's true | Sitemaps are public and easy to pull. AI can cluster URLs into a topic map fast. Genuinely useful for understanding site structure. | What's hype | A URL list is not a strategy. It can't see traffic, rankings, demand, or backlinks. It inflates programmatic filler into "domination" and the AI confidently over-reads a list it can't even fully ingest. | The catch | The free part is the useless part. The part that reveals strategy costs money. | Rating | 3/10. A fine first step mislabeled as the whole job. | Actually useful for | Mapping a competitor's content structure and catching their programmatic SEO plays. Nothing past that. | The 5 minutes is real. The "strategy" isn't. You end up with a prettier version of "here's everything they ever published," which is not the same as "here's what's making them money." Next in the series: I'll take another viral one-click AI workflow and put it on the stand. If you've seen one that smells like slop, send it my way and I'll test it.