Definition
Competitor analysis is the structured comparison of your brand with the companies you compete against, to find where they win attention, trust and customers that you could win instead. In marketing and SEO it has long covered rankings, backlinks, content and positioning. Since AI assistants started answering buying questions directly, it also covers how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot describe, rank and cite each competitor.
The AI layer often tells a different story than search rankings. A competitor with modest organic rankings can be the first brand named in AI answers because review sites, listicles and forums mention it often. A search leader can be missing from AI answers because its pages are blocked for AI crawlers or never answer the comparison questions people ask. Engines also differ from each other: they use different search sources and favor different source types, so a competitor can lead on one platform and barely appear on another.
A useful AI-era competitor analysis compares brands on a fixed set of prompts, per engine and per market, along these dimensions:
- Presence: in how many answers each brand is mentioned, expressed as AI share of voice or mention rate.
- Prominence: where each brand appears in the answer and how much attention it gets, captured by answer position and an AI visibility score.
- Sources: which domains are cited for each prompt, which competitor pages hold the top citation slots, and which third-party sites mention competitors but not you.
- Framing: the sentiment and attributes attached to each brand, such as 'cheapest', 'best for enterprise' or 'hard to set up'.
- Coverage gaps: prompts and topics where competitors appear and you do not, the core of content gap analysis.
The competitor set is part of the measurement. Share of voice divides your mentions by the mentions of the brands you compare against, so adding loosely related companies dilutes the number without telling you anything. Keep the direct list to the few brands whose offering overlaps most with your tracked prompts, and review the other brands AI answers name, since they can be competitors you have not considered. In Promptwatch, for example, the My brands scope covers your brand plus direct competitors, while All brands includes every brand detected in the responses, which is why the two views can show different shares for the same period.
Turn the findings into work in this order: fix access problems first (pages engines cannot fetch), then build or improve pages for prompts where competitors are named and you are not, then pursue coverage on the third-party pages that are cited for those prompts, and finally address framing issues, such as outdated pricing or a missing feature that answers repeat. Re-run the analysis monthly, and immediately after major model releases, because answers and cited sources shift without any change on your side. Traditional SEO competitor research (rankings, backlinks, content volume) still belongs alongside it, since AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's index. Our guide to AI share of voice explains how to read the main comparison metric.
Examples of Competitor Analysis
- A project management vendor finds that a competitor with weaker Google rankings is named first in most ChatGPT answers for 'best tool for agencies', and traces it to three listicles that feature the competitor and omit the vendor.
- A bank compares how AI answers describe its fees with how they describe two rivals, finds outdated fee figures repeated from a 2024 review article, and asks the publisher to update it.
- A SaaS team removes six loosely related brands from its competitor list and sees its share of voice reflect the three companies it actually loses deals to.
- An agency builds a monthly heatmap of prompts by competitor and engine for a client, showing where the client wins on Perplexity but trails on Google AI Mode.
