Compare My Ai Visibility Against Competitors

• Start with four numbers that separate a brand that is cited from one that is merely present.
• Your AI competitors are not always the firms you fight in search.
• A usable benchmark runs 50 to 100 prompts, according to Hikoo's guide.
• A single AI answer is a sample of one.
• Competitors win where they are named in AI answers and your brand is absent. For instance, according to Google (cited in CampaignCreators' HubSpot AEO benchmarking guide), AI Overviews reach more than 1.5 billion people every month.

Start with four numbers that separate a brand that is cited from one that is merely present. Mention rate is the share of tested prompts in which your brand is named at all. Share of voice is your mentions divided by all brand mentions in the same answer set. Citation rate tracks how often an engine links to a page you own. Position when named and sentiment show whether you lead the list or appear as an afterthought. According to iPullRank's 2026 framework, as echoed by Hikoo, the core comparative set is AI Share of Voice, Mention Rate, Citation Rate and Source Overlap. Trackbase adds Visibility Score and sentiment to the list (Trackbase). Compare all of them against the same competitor set.

Source Overlap follows the formula given in Hikoo's guide. According to Hikoo's guide, appearing in 30% of relevant prompts can be a win or a disaster depending on competitors' rates: if the top competitor sits at 70% the brand is losing, and at 10% it dominates.

Your AI competitors are not always the firms you fight in search. Omnibound recommends covering four competitor categories:

• Direct competitors
• Indirect substitutes
• Informational publishers and analysts
• Ecosystem authorities such as review sites

For example, a buyer researching a CRM may be shown a comparison article, a Reddit thread and a review aggregator before seeing any vendor. Those third-party sources often shape the answer. According to Analyze AI, a competitor can win the AI answer while ranking lower in Google, so search rank alone will mislead you (Analyze AI). Build your competitor set from the answers you actually receive, then keep the names that co-occur with yours.

A usable benchmark runs 50 to 100 prompts, according to Hikoo's guide. Spread those prompts across five archetypes:

• Discovery
• Comparison
• Alternative
• Use-case and transactional

Skip purely branded prompts, because they flatter every brand equally and reveal little about competitive position. Omnibound suggests distributing benchmark prompts across four buyer stages: awareness, comparison, problem-aware and purchase-intent (Omnibound). A purchase-intent prompt, such as asking for the best tool for a given team size, is usually worth more to your pipeline than a broad awareness query, so weight the results accordingly. Keep the prompt list fixed between runs. That way, changes in results reflect the market rather than your edits to the prompts. According to the iPullRank 2026 framework (echoed by Aleyda Solis, as cited by Hikoo), the four core comparative AI visibility metrics are AI Share of Voice, Mention Rate, Citation Rate, and Source Overlap.

A single AI answer is a sample of one. According to Asky, a University of Toronto preprint found that ChatGPT's cited pages overlapped by only 15% across same-day API replays of one question. Answers are generated fresh and vary with prompt wording, model and the freshest sources available, as Trackbase notes.

So run every prompt several times, then average the results. Treat small gaps between brands as noise until repeated sampling confirms them. Recording the timestamp and engine for each run lets you separate real shifts in AI visibility from model updates.

Competitors win where they are named in AI answers and your brand is absent. The most useful output is therefore a gap list of those prompts. Filter your results to find them, then group the gaps by topic and by buyer stage. Hikoo's guide frames the stakes clearly: appearing in 30% of relevant prompts is a win if the top competitor sits at 10%, and a loss if it sits at 70% (Hikoo). Read your own rate only against competitor rates. Then examine the sources behind each winning answer:

• Identify the page cited for each rival answer.
• Check whether that page is a comparison article you have never appeared in.
• If so, that article is the gap, not your product page.

Track engines separately, because their citation behaviour differs. Asky reports that Statcounter put ChatGPT at 80.48% of AI chatbot market share in September 2026, with Gemini at 10.91% and Perplexity at 5.85%. Market share is a reason to weight engines, not a reason to ignore small ones: a buyer in a niche may rely on Perplexity for research.

Google AI Overviews reach more than 1.5 billion people monthly, according to CampaignCreators. Report each engine on its own row so a strong ChatGPT score cannot hide a weak Perplexity one.

Competitor citations usually trace back to a small set of third-party pages. Compute Source Overlap to see how much of that citation pool you share with each rival. The formula is common sources divided by competitor sources, multiplied by 100 (Hikoo). Low overlap with a strong rival means that rival has earned placements you lack.

Close the gap by pitching or updating the pages engines already cite for your category. You can also publish owned, answer-first pages that match the comparison and use-case prompts you lost. Fastlook's Citation Analytics reports where your brand appears across major engines, which helps locate those pages.

Refresh the benchmark on a fixed cadence, and re-run it sooner after a major model update or a competitor launch. Because answers shift between runs, a one-time audit goes stale quickly. Fastlook's Citation Analytics tracks citations in real time across major engines.

Brand Memory tracks citations across 6 engines, so monitoring can run continuously rather than as a quarterly project. Pair this tracking with AI Feed, which pipes live signals to crawlers on Grow and Scale plans, to keep your pages fresh for the engines you measure.

Related guides

• Citation Manager Pricing: Free vs Paid Compared
• Citation Management vs Manual Submission: Which Fits?
• GenAI Search Optimizer vs Competitors: Features & Pricing