Legal
Can I copy text from a competitor’s website?
No. Website copy is protected by copyright the moment it is written, so copying it is infringement regardless of how ordinary it seems. It is also self-defeating in search — duplicated text gives an engine no reason to prefer your page over the original.
What copyright protects and what it does not
- Protected
- The specific wording, structure and expression of the text.
- Not protected
- Facts, prices, ideas, and the general approach to describing a service.
- The practical line
- Reading five competitors and writing your own version is normal research. Pasting theirs is not.
The SEO consequence
Duplicated content is not usually penalised, but it is filtered — a search engine picks one version to show and the original almost always wins. You end up with a page that cannot rank and a legal exposure at the same time.
What to do instead
Write what you know that they do not: your specific process, your actual prices, the questions your customers ask, the situations where you would recommend someone else. That last one is unexpectedly persuasive and impossible to copy.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers it in about 6 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.