Which Alternative Pages Are Actually Worth Building for B2B Software?

Should you build a page targeting your competitor's name?

Sometimes, and far less often than the tactic gets recommended. An alternative page earns its place when you can say something true and specific about who each product suits. It fails when it is a thin restatement of a competitor's feature list with your logo at the top, which is most of the ones I read.

The tactic is popular because the intent behind the search is unmistakable. Someone typing a competitor's name plus the word alternatives has a problem, a budget, and a shortlist. That is the most qualified traffic in B2B software, and it is why every content plan eventually proposes forty of these pages.

Forty is the mistake. Here is how I decide which ones are worth building, what has to be on them, and where the line sits between a genuinely useful page and something that gets you in trouble.

What is an alternative page, and how does it differ from a comparison page?

An alternative page answers the question of what else exists instead of one named product. A comparison page answers which of two named products a specific buyer should choose. The first is a list with judgement applied. The second is a decision, made in public, for a reader who has already narrowed the field.

They are not interchangeable, and mixing them is why so many of these pages read as mush. If someone is searching for alternatives, they are still exploring, so they need scope: here are the five real options, here is the axis they differ on, here is which one fits which situation. Give that reader a head-to-head and you have answered a question they have not asked yet.

If someone is searching for one product versus another, they have finished exploring. They want a recommendation and the reasoning behind it. Give that reader a list of five options and you have made their decision harder, not easier. I went deeper on the head-to-head format in my notes on building a comparison page that answer engines will cite.

Which alternative pages are actually worth building?

Only the ones where you genuinely win for a describable kind of buyer. That is the whole filter. If you cannot finish the sentence you should pick us over them when, you do not have a page, you have a wish, and the reader will feel the difference in the first paragraph.

The second filter is whether you can be specific without being unfair. You need real knowledge of the other product, current knowledge, not what it was like when you last looked eighteen months ago. If nobody on your team has used the competitor recently, you are about to publish guesswork with a competitor's trademark in the title tag.

The third filter is volume of a different kind: how many of your actual customers came from that product. Your support conversations and your sales calls already contain the answer to which alternatives matter. A page about a competitor nobody switches from is a page nobody needs, however good the search volume looks in Ahrefs or Semrush. Your reviews on G2, Capterra and TrustRadius are a second place the same answer is already written down.

In practice these three filters reduce a list of forty candidate pages to a handful. That is the right outcome, and a handful of excellent alternative pages will outperform forty templated ones by a margin that surprises people every time.

What does Google's own guidance actually say about pages like this?

It is unusually direct. Google's helpful content guidance asks whether the content provides original information, reporting, research, or analysis, and whether content that draws on other sources avoids simply copying or rewriting those sources instead of adding substantial value. An alternative page assembled from competitor marketing copy fails both tests by construction.

The same guidance asks whether the content is written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well, and whether the page presents information in a way that makes you want to trust it, through clear sourcing and evidence of the expertise involved. That is a description of a page written by someone who has actually used both products.

There is a sharper line in Google's guidance on product reviews, which emphasises demonstrating the number of products that were tested, what the test results were, and how the tests were conducted, accompanied by evidence of the work involved. Most alternative pages contain no evidence of any work at all, and the absence is visible to a reader long before it matters to a crawler.

The self-check I would apply to your draft is Google's own: are you mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value? If the honest answer is yes, the page is not ready. I covered the broader trust picture in my piece on the signals that make Google trust a site.

Where is the line between a useful alternative page and something Google calls spam?

Google defines scaled content abuse as when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. The operative word is many. One carefully argued page about a competitor you actually know is not what that policy is aimed at. Forty generated from a template with the product name swapped is exactly what it is aimed at.

Google's thin affiliation policy is instructive even if you run no affiliate links, because it describes publishing content where the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value. Swap merchant for competitor and you have described the failure mode of the average alternative page precisely.

So the line is not about whether you may name a competitor. You may. The line is about whether the page exists because you have something to say, or because a keyword tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush reported some search volume for it. That distinction is not enforceable by a machine in every case, but it is obvious to a reader, and increasingly the reader's judgement and the ranking outcome point the same way.

What has to be on the page for a buyer to trust it?

Four things, and the first is the one everybody skips: a clear statement of when the other product is the better choice. A page that says the competitor is worse at everything is a page that tells the reader you are not a credible narrator, and they will leave to find someone who is.

The second is a date and a basis. Say when you last checked, and say how you know. Software changes constantly, and an undated claim about a competitor's limitations is a liability that ages badly, sometimes into something legally uncomfortable. Write it as a checked fact with a timestamp, or do not write it.

The third is the switching cost, stated honestly. Migration effort, data export, retraining, contract timing. Buyers know this part is real, and a page that pretends switching is free reads as marketing rather than help. Being the one page that tells the truth about the annoying part is worth more than any feature table.

The fourth is a specific next step that matches where the reader is. Someone comparing alternatives is not ready for a sales call. A trial, a sandbox, a detailed teardown, a migration guide, something they can do alone at eleven at night without talking to anyone.

How do you stay fair to a competitor you are trying to beat?

Write about them the way you would want a competitor to write about you, then check whether you would send the page to their founder without wincing. That test is not a moral flourish, it is a practical filter. Pages that fail it tend to contain the specific claims that get corrected in public later.

Stick to capability statements you can source to the other company's own documentation or pricing page, and avoid characterising their intentions, their team, or their trajectory. Their docs are the primary source for what their product does. Your opinion is the primary source for what that means for a buyer. Keep the two visibly separate on the page and most of the risk disappears.

Across 70 plus projects for 25 plus clients over the last 6 plus years, I have never seen a fair alternative page cause a problem, and I have seen an unfair one get quoted back at a founder in a sales call. The asymmetry is enormous and it points in one direction.

How do you know whether these pages are working?

Not by rankings, and not by traffic. An alternative page that ranks first and converts nobody is a page that attracted people who were never going to switch. The measurement that matters is whether the page appears in the path of deals that closed, which means you need to be able to see page views inside HubSpot or Salesforce rather than only inside Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The second signal is qualitative and arrives faster: does your sales team send the page to prospects unprompted? A page a rep chooses to send is a page that answers a real objection. A page nobody sends is decoration, regardless of what the traffic chart says.

The third is citation. Increasingly the first place a buyer encounters your comparison is inside an answer from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews rather than on your site, and the pages that get pulled into those answers are the ones with clear, attributable, specific statements rather than adjectives. That reinforces everything above, which is convenient, because it means writing the honest version is also the version that gets surfaced.

What should you do next?

Open your closed-won deals from the last two quarters and list the products those customers left. Take the top two. For each one, try to write a single sentence that says when the other product is the better choice, in language their own customers would agree with. If you cannot write that sentence, do not build the page yet.

If you can write it, build one page, properly, with a date, a stated basis, an honest account of switching, and a next step that does not require talking to a human. Then wait a quarter before building the second, and use what you learn from the first to write it better rather than faster. The same discipline that keeps the page useful is what I described in my notes on what the helpful content guidance means for AI-written pages.

I have published over 350 articles on how answer engines and search engines treat this kind of content, and the pattern has not changed: specific and honest outperforms comprehensive and hedged. If you want a second opinion on which alternative pages are worth your time, reach out and let's chat.