AI Competitors — who gets cited instead of you

How to read the AI Competitors page — the comparison between your brand and tracked competitors in AI assistant answers (mentions per source with the gap from you and the trend, citations with a link), the prompts where you lose and the ranking of brands most cited by AIs on your prompts, with one-click add to competitors. Computed on answers already collected, without using credits.

Knowing the AI does not cite you is half the picture: the other half is who gets cited instead. The AI Competitors page compares your brand’s presence with your competitors’ in the most recent AI answers and shows you the ranking of brands assistants mention most on your prompts.

Where to find it

Open the project → sidebar group AI Visibility → AI Competitors (⚔️ icon).

Zero credits. The analysis runs on answers already collected from your monitored prompt checks: competitor detection runs on stored text and citations, with no new calls to the AIs.

Comparison with competitors

The table compares your brand (row highlighted with the You badge) against the project’s tracked competitors:

  • one column per AI source (AI Overview, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) with the percentage of checks in which that brand is mentioned
  • Mentions — overall percentage of prompts in which the brand is named in at least one source
  • Link — percentage of prompts in which the brand’s site is cited as a source with a link in at least one source

In competitor rows each cell also shows, as a superscript, the gap from you in points (e.g. +25 = that competitor is mentioned in 25% more checks) and the colour is relative to you: red if the competitor beats you, green if you’re ahead, grey when tied. In your own row the colour follows the absolute bands like Share of Voice. On the Mentions and Link columns a ▲/▼ arrow shows the trend vs the previous check.

Competitors are ranked by presence: whoever is above you in mentions is occupying the AI space on your topics.

The AI Competitors page: the comparison table with competitors, your row marked You, one column per AI source with the percentage and the gap as a superscript, Mentions and Link with the trend; below, the Prompts where you lose list and, on the right, the Brands most cited by AIs ranking with the + add buttons

Competitors are managed from the project’s Competitors page (Manage competitors button at the top): they’re the same ones used for SERP ranking comparisons — see Project competitors.

Prompts where you lose

Below the table, the list of prompts in which at least one competitor is mentioned and you are not, with the AI sources and the names of the competitors cited for each prompt. It’s the operational list: every row is a real user question that AIs answer by naming a competitor instead of you.

Brands most cited by AIs

The 🏆 ranking lists the brands and companies AI assistants name when answering your monitored prompts, with the share of prompts in which they appear. When the answers allow it, the site the AIs cite together with the brand appears under the name. Brands you already track as competitors carry the competitor tag; for the others the + add button opens the competitors modal pre-filled (name and, if known, domain) and brings you back to this page after saving. If the domain is unknown, the modal offers a Google search of the brand to find it.

The most useful signal: if a brand shows up often in the ranking and is not among your tracked competitors, AI assistants consider it a relevant player on your topics — add it to your tracked competitors to follow it in SERP rankings too.

What to do with the results

  • A competitor beats you on a specific source (red cell with +N) → look at their citations in the prompts’ detail panel: what kind of pages earn them the mention?
  • Prompts where you lose → for each one, the page answering that question must be made more “citable” (data, structured guides, schema) or written, if missing.
  • High mentions but zero Link (for you) → the AI knows the brand but doesn’t use your site as a source: work on citable pages.
  • Unknown brands at the top of the ranking → they’re your real competitors in the AI space, even if you don’t meet them in SERPs: add them and study them.

See also:

Last updated: 5 September 2026