Competitors

How a competitor is discovered

Every collected answer is checked for brand names, the same mention extraction that decides whether an answer named you (see Key terms for mention versus citation). A name that does not yet match one of your tracked brands surfaces on this page, under "Brands appearing in your answers": grouped by name, with how many answers named it, how many times, and when it was first seen in the trailing 30 days (api/routers/untracked_brands.py#list_untracked_brands, api/routers/untracked_brands.py#_query_untracked). That list is ranked by how often a name comes up and kept to the top 100; a brand mentioned less often than that cutoff can still be out there without showing up here. An "Add as competitor" button on each row prefills the add form with that name.

Nothing on that list is tracked yet. An untracked brand's mentions are excluded from every metric that counts brand mentions, including the ones described below, until you add it as a competitor.

Tracked versus untracked

Adding a competitor (api/routers/competitors.py#add_competitor) records its domain against your project. The next time mention extraction runs, a matching brand entity is created for it (api/services/brand_mentions.py#sync_brand_entities_for_project), so an answer naming that brand resolves to a tracked entity instead of landing back on the untracked list. From then on its citations, its domain visibility, and its mentions all count against you by name, not only by domain.

Tracked is not the same as active. Pausing a competitor keeps its card and its visibility history, but drops it out of the share-of-voice chart and the head-to-head comparison below, and out of the roster handed to future mention extraction: an answer naming a paused competitor after that point is recorded unresolved rather than credited to it, the same as a brand you never tracked at all. It drops out of the total those shares divide by as well, not only out of the picture: the set of domains the bar chart sums over is built from active competitor rows alone (api/routers/pages.py#competitors_page), so pausing one takes its citations out of the denominator instead of leaving them folded into it.

Tracking a competitor also uses one of your plan's competitor slots; see Pricing for what each plan includes (api/services/limits.py#check_competitor_limit).

What the head-to-head view compares

The Head-to-Head tab compares you against every active tracked competitor, prompt by prompt: up to 20 of your active prompts, unsorted and with no guarantee the same 20 come back on a later load, each showing how often you were cited versus how often each competitor was, including a prompt where neither of you appeared at all (api/routers/pages.py#_head_to_head). A competitor's own detail page has a narrower version, "Prompts that cite you both": just the two of you, kept to the prompts where at least one of you was actually cited, sorted so the biggest gaps surface first, and kept to the 20 rows with the largest gap (api/routers/pages.py#_shared_prompts). The two views answer different questions: the tab is a scoreboard across your whole field, shared prompts is where you and one rival actually collide.

The detail page also breaks the comparison down per engine, listing only the engines where at least one of you has been cited so far, and charts the last 14 days of both visibility scores side by side, whether or not anything was measured on a given day.

Share of voice

Two different numbers on this page are both called share of voice. The hero figure and the bar chart beneath it size a bar for you and every active tracked competitor by how many times that domain was cited. "By brand mentioned", the list underneath it, is the same brand-mention analysis behind the product's single share-of-voice figure (api/services/brand_metrics.py#brand_share_of_voice, api/services/brand_metrics.py#share_of_voice_by_entity), broken out one row per tracked brand instead of one number for you; a brand with no mentions in the window is simply absent from that list, not shown at zero. The two figures still divide by different populations, so a single answer can move one and not the other, but they now agree about what an inactive competitor means: neither counts one, whether it was paused or removed. See Domain-citation share of voice for what the bar chart's numbers count, and Share of voice for what "By brand mentioned" counts, including all four pause and remove cases.

If nothing shows up yet

A competitor's visibility, citations, and top pages all fill in from the same daily runs that populate the rest of the product. See Troubleshooting: No citations yet for what an empty comparison does and does not mean before you conclude a competitor was never cited.

Related

• Citations: how a citation is attributed to a domain, yours or a competitor's
• Key terms: what separates a mention from a citation
• Metrics defined: the mention-based share of voice formula, and domain-citation share of voice for the other figure on this screen
• Troubleshooting: No citations yet: what to check before expecting a comparison to appear