A competitor copied your website. What can you do?

Copying text is a copyright matter

Original copy you paid for or wrote is protected by copyright, and lifting it is an infringement. Layout and general design are much harder to claim.

So the enforceable complaint is usually about text and photographs, particularly photographs of your own work, which are unambiguous.

The practical steps, in order

Screenshot everything with dates. Check whether their site is newer than yours using the Internet Archive.

Then a polite email asking them to remove it. That resolves it more often than people expect, because it is frequently a web designer who did it rather than the owner.

• —Screenshot both sites with the date visible
• —Check the Internet Archive for which came first
• —A polite email to the business owner first
• —A DMCA notice to their host if that fails
• —Google's copyright removal request as a last resort

Why it matters less than it feels

Duplicate text does not usually hurt your rankings — Google generally works out which came first, and the copier gains very little.

What actually wins is the material they cannot copy: your photographs of your own jobs, your reviews, your Google profile, your response time. Those are the things a competitor cannot lift.

The useful response

Send the email, then go and add the things that cannot be copied. Recent photographs with dates, named local jobs, reviews from this month.

A copied website is always slightly out of date and always generic. Making yours specific and current is a better use of the annoyance than a fortnight of legal correspondence.