AI Visibility

Competitor AI Visibility

Find out which competitors AI names when it does not name you, and which sources put them there.

Compare Against Rivals

Your visibility score in isolation is hard to act on. The same score alongside the brands sharing your answers is not: it tells you which specific rivals occupy the slots you want, in which question types, and which documents put them there.

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The short version

  • AI visibility is positional. The relevant question is who was named instead of you.
  • Assistants often name competitors you do not consider competitors, which is real market information.
  • Losing comparison prompts usually means a rival published the comparison and you did not.
  • The competitor gap carries 10% of our score directly, and shapes how the rest should be read.

Visibility Is a Positional Metric

Answers name a handful of brands, so every slot a competitor holds is one you do not. That makes competitor comparison the natural frame rather than an add-on. A score of 45 means something quite different when the leaders in your answers sit at 50 versus when they sit at 90: in the first case you are in the fight, in the second you are not being considered. This is also why cross-industry score comparisons are meaningless, and why we weight the competitor gap explicitly.

The Competitors You Did Not Know You Had

One of the more useful outputs is the list of brands appearing alongside you that you had not been tracking. Models group by problem solved rather than by industry categorisation, so a company you consider adjacent may be occupying your answers because buyers describe their problem in a way that reaches both of you. That is genuine market intelligence, and it usually arrives before it shows up anywhere else, because assistants reflect how buyers talk rather than how vendors categorise themselves.

Reading the Loss by Prompt Type

The pattern of where you lose is the diagnosis, and each has a fairly specific cause.

  • Losing comparison prompts: a competitor published the comparison page and the model reads theirs.
  • Losing best-of prompts: they are in the roundups and listicles that get cited, and you are not.
  • Losing price prompts: they publish real numbers and you say "contact sales", so there is nothing to quote.
  • Losing review prompts: they have presence on the review platforms your category cites, and you do not.
  • Losing everywhere on one platform: usually crawlability or an entity resolution problem, not content.

Discovering Rivals From the Answers

You can supply competitors, and it helps to, but the discovered set is often more revealing than the named one. We extract candidate brands directly from the responses, which means the comparison reflects who the models actually place in your category rather than who you consider a threat. It also demands care: extracted names have to be validated, or you end up with generic phrases and product categories sitting in a competitor list, which makes the whole comparison worthless.

What to Do With the Gap

Pick the single prompt category with the widest gap and address its specific cause, rather than trying to close everything. If a rival owns comparison prompts, publish an honest comparison, including where they are the better choice, because a comparison that only flatters you reads as marketing to a model and to a reader. If they own review prompts, the work is earning reviews. Then re-check the same prompts next month and see whether the gap narrowed. It is slower than it sounds and considerably more reliable than broad content programmes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find which competitors AI names in my category?

Run the buyer prompts without naming anyone and collect every brand that appears. The recurring names are the ones models treat as your category, which is not always the list you would have written.

Why does AI name a competitor I have never heard of?

Models group by the problem being solved rather than by industry labels, and they weight whoever is documented well. A smaller company with strong third-party coverage frequently outranks a larger one with little.

Should I write comparison pages against competitors?

Yes, and honestly. Comparison content is cited heavily because it directly answers a common question. A page that concedes where the competitor wins is more likely to be trusted and quoted than one that does not.

Can I track a competitor score over time?

Yes. The same prompt set measures everyone appearing in the answers, so you get their trend alongside yours from the same run at no extra cost.