Take a distinctive sentence from your strongest content and search it inside quotation marks. Note every domain where it appears. Directory profiles, syndicated posts, and platform-hosted video frequently outrank the original on your own site — meaning your work builds authority you can't take with you.
The check is one search
Pick the best thing you've published. The explainer you're proud of, the market analysis people mention, the guide that took a week.
Find a sentence in it that's distinctly yours — specific enough that nobody would write it by coincidence. Not "estate planning is important for families." Something like "we mapped every domain, named the one that should win, and wrote the redirect plan."
Put it in Google inside quotation marks. Exact-match search returns pages containing that precise string.
Now read the results. You're looking for two things: how many domains the sentence appears on, and which one Google ranks first.
If a copy on someone else's domain outranks your original, that's the finding. Your work is doing its job — for them.
Where your content ends up
Directory profiles. Legal and financial directories often let you paste substantial content into a profile. Those directories have far more domain authority than your firm's site, and their version routinely wins.
Syndication you agreed to. Trade association newsletters, regional business journals, partner sites. Often a good thing for reach — but if the syndicated copy is the one that ranks, you've traded search visibility for exposure without deciding to.
Platform publishing. Articles posted to LinkedIn or Medium as well as your own site. Both platforms substantially outweigh a boutique firm's domain.
Video without a home. A YouTube video with a good description and no transcript anywhere you control. The content exists; the searchable text belongs to Google.
Guest posts and quoted commentary. Generally good — this is the independent corroboration that matters for AI visibility. Worth knowing which pieces live where, though.
PDFs. Firms put real substance into downloadable guides and then link them from a page that says nothing. The PDF may rank, but it's a poor destination and often a dead end.
The IDX version
Real estate teams have a structural form of this problem: listing pages hosted on a vendor's subdomain rather than the team's domain. Same principle, different mechanics, and it's covered separately in how do I tell how much of my visibility is trapped on my IDX vendor's domain.
What actually matters here
Duplication is not automatically a penalty. Google picks a canonical version and the others usually just don't rank. Nothing is being punished.
The question is which version it picks, and what happens if that relationship ends.
Ask it plainly: if this directory shut down tomorrow, or you stopped paying for the listing, or the association restructured its newsletter — what would you keep?
For content on your domain, everything. For content on theirs, the page disappears, the links pointing at it break, and the ranking history goes with it. You cannot redirect a URL you don't control.
The version that's worth acting on quickly
Content copied without your permission. Scraper sites republish professional content routinely, and occasionally a competitor does it deliberately.
The exact-match search finds these too. Distinguishing a scraper from an agreed syndication is usually obvious from context — but if a copy you didn't authorise is outranking your original, that's a different conversation from an editorial one.
What you can and can't conclude
Verified — Where copies of your content live, and which one Google ranks first. Directly observable, and you can screenshot it.
Pending — What the arrangement costs you. Quantifying it means comparing what each version earns, which requires access to analytics on a domain you don't own. You can usually establish the shape of the problem. The size needs data you may not be able to get.
Directional — That the original should be the canonical version. Well-supported as a general principle, but there are real cases where the trade is worth it: reach through a directory your buyers actually use may be worth more than the ranking. The point is to have decided, rather than to discover it.
What to do this week
Run the exact-match search on your three best pieces. Write down every domain each appears on. Mark each ours or theirs.
Then look at the theirs column and ask which of those relationships you'd want to keep if you had to choose. Most firms have never separated the two, and the exercise takes an afternoon.
Content living on someone else's domain is one of six symptoms in the full map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients.