RunCabin Blog · Protecting your business

A competitor copied my website or stole my photos. What do I do?

November 6, 2026 · 8 min read

Short answer: save the proof first, send one polite email, and if that does not work, send a takedown notice to their web host and a removal request to Google. It usually happens like this. A customer mentions "that other company has the same deck photo you have," or you look up the new outfit in town and find your kitchen, your crew's paint line, your before-and-after of the Hendersons' driveway, sitting on their site with their logo on top. Sometimes it is your "About" paragraph too, with the town names swapped. It feels personal because it is: those photos are years of your work, and now they are selling someone else.

The good news is that this is one of the few online problems a small business owner can usually fix alone, for free, with a few emails and forms. Here is the order to do it in. (This is practical guidance, not legal advice - if real money is on the line, talk to a copyright lawyer.)

First, is it actually yours?

In the US, a photo is protected by copyright the moment it is taken, and a paragraph is protected the moment it is written. You do not need to register anything, add a watermark, or put a copyright line in your footer for that protection to exist. But the protection belongs to whoever made the thing, which matters more in the trades than people expect:

• You or your crew took the photos on the job: they are your business's. This is the clear case.
• A hired photographer took them: the photographer usually owns them unless your agreement says otherwise. You may need them to send the notice, or to give you written permission to act.
• A customer took them and sent them to you: the customer owns them. You can still ask the copier to take them down, but a formal notice should come from the owner.
• The photos are from a manufacturer's or supplier's gallery: they are not yours, and the competitor may have the same license you do.

Wording works the same way, with one catch: copyright protects the actual sentences, not the facts or ideas behind them. Nobody owns "licensed and insured," a list of services, the towns you cover, or the idea of a "Free estimates" button. If a competitor's site simply has the same sections as yours, that is not copying. If whole paragraphs match word for word, or with a few words swapped, that is.

Step 1: Save the proof before you say anything

The moment a copier knows you have noticed, the page can change. So collect evidence first, quietly:

• Screenshot their page with the web address and the date visible. Do it on your phone and your computer.
• Save the page to the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. Paste their page address into "Save Page Now" and it keeps a dated public copy that nobody can edit later. Do the same for your own page.
• Find your originals. The original photo files in your phone's camera roll carry the date and often the location they were taken. Keep them untouched. If the photos were in a job folder, an invoice email, or an old Facebook post, screenshot those dates too.
• Check how far it goes. Run each photo through a reverse image search (Google Lens or TinEye) to see where else it shows up. For text, copy a distinctive sentence from your site, put it in quotation marks, and search it.

That last step often turns up the real story. Sometimes the "competitor" is a cheap web design shop that filled a dozen client sites with photos scraped from local businesses, and the owner of the copying company has no idea. That changes the tone of your first message.

Step 2: Send one short, polite email

Most copying gets fixed right here. Plenty of owners who did it did not build their own site, and they are not eager to fight about it. Keep it short and factual:

Hi, I'm the owner of [Your Business]. The photos of [job / project] on your page at [address] were taken by my crew and are on my website at [your page], published [date]. Please remove them by [a date about 5 days out]. If they're still up after that, I'll file a takedown notice with your web host. Thanks.

No threats, no lawyer talk, no insults. You want them to read it and quietly delete the photos, not dig in. Send it to the email on their site, and if there is a web designer credit in their footer, send a copy there too, since the designer is often the one who actually did it.

Step 3: If they ignore you, send a takedown notice to their web host

This is the step that usually ends it. Under the DMCA, a US law, the company that hosts a website has to act on a proper copyright complaint or risk being held responsible itself, so most hosts remove the content quickly.

To find the host, put their domain into a "who is hosting this" lookup tool, or check the domain's record at lookup.icann.org. Then look on the host's website for a "copyright," "DMCA," or "abuse" page. Many hosts are also listed in the US Copyright Office's DMCA Designated Agent Directory at dmca.copyright.gov.

A valid notice needs a few specific things, and most hosts give you a form that asks for them:

• What your work is (the original photos or page, with a link to where you published it)
• Exactly where the copy is (the full page address, and which photos)
• Your name, address, phone, and email
• A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you own the work or are allowed to act for the owner
• Your signature (typing your full name usually counts)

Two cautions. Only send one for work that is really yours, because false notices carry legal risk of their own. And the copier is allowed to file a counter-notice saying you are wrong. If they do, the host can put the content back after about two weeks unless you file a lawsuit. That is the point where a lawyer earns their fee.

Step 4: Get it out of Google, Facebook, and their Google listing

The copy may live in more places than one website:

• Google Search: Google has a legal removal request for copyright that drops the infringing page from search results. It does not delete the page from the internet, which is why the host notice still matters, but it stops the copy from competing with you in search.
• Their Google Business Profile: stolen photos often end up on the copier's Maps listing, where customers see them first. Open the photo on Google Maps and use its report option. Showing work you did not do misleads customers, which Google's own content rules do not allow.
• Facebook and Instagram: Meta has an intellectual property report form for photos posted without permission. Link the post and your original.
• Directories like Yelp, Houzz, or Nextdoor: each has a way to report content that is not the poster's. Search the site's help pages for "copyright."

When it is worth a lawyer (and when it is not)

For most owners, getting the photos down is the whole goal, and steps 2 through 4 handle that for nothing but an hour of your time. A lawyer makes sense when the copier files a counter-notice, keeps putting your work back up, copied your whole site including your business story and reviews, or is passing off your name in a way that is costing you jobs.

If you want money for the copying, know two things. Suing for copyright in federal court generally requires registering the work with the US Copyright Office first, and the bigger damages are only available if you registered before the copying started or soon after you first published. There is also a cheaper route: the Copyright Claims Board, a small-claims court run by the Copyright Office, handles claims up to $30,000 without hiring a lawyer. If your job photos are the heart of your marketing, registering them in batches is worth looking into before you ever need it.

The best defense is a site that is clearly the original

Here is the uncomfortable part. Owners who never had their own website often have the hardest time proving their work is theirs. If your best photos only live in a Facebook album or a text thread with a customer, it is your word against a competitor's polished site. If they live on your website, on your domain, with your business name on every page and a public archive date, the proof is already done.

It also matters for Google. When two pages have the same wording, Google generally shows one and quietly drops the other, and it tends to keep the version it found first. A competitor copying a page that Google already knows is yours mostly hurts the competitor. A competitor copying a business that has no site at all gets to look like the original.

A few habits make you harder to copy and easier to defend:

• Put your real job photos on your own site, not just social media, and keep adding new ones as jobs finish.
• Shoot the job so it is clearly yours. Your truck in the driveway, your yard sign, a crew shirt in the corner. A small logo in the corner works too, though a determined copier can crop it.
• Write your pages about things only you can say: your towns, your license number, the kind of jobs you actually take, how you handle a callback. Specific, true wording is hard to pass off.
• Keep your originals. Back up the full-size files with their dates. They are your receipts.

Where RunCabin fits

If your work is getting copied because it lives everywhere except a website of your own, that is what RunCabin's done-for-you websites fix. You answer our questionnaire about your trade, your services, and your towns and send your real job photos, and we build the site from your answers with AI, and a web developer finishes every page. It goes on your own domain under your own business name, written in your words, not borrowed from anyone else's. You'll see your first version within 24 hours of sending your answers and photos, and when you finish a job worth showing off, you ask and the new photos go up.

It starts at $499 to build, then $39.99 a month for hosting (or $479.88 a year), with no long contract and no lead fees. Optional tools are priced in the questionnaire, and you see the total before you pay. And if you ever cancel, your domain is yours.

---

Related reading: can I copy text from a competitor's website? · do I need permission to post photos of a customer's property? · what photos to put on your website