How do I compare my AI visibility against competitors?

To compare your AI visibility against competitors, treat it like SEO share-of-voice—but measure what AI assistants actually mention, recommend, and cite.

A practical framework is:

1. Define the competitive set. Pick your brand plus 3–10 genuine alternatives. Keep this set stable; changing competitors changes the denominator and makes historical comparisons misleading. Inner Labs+1
2. Create a representative prompt set. Use 30–100 questions that potential customers might genuinely ask, especially unbranded prompts such as “best software for X,” “X vs Y,” “how do I solve X?”, “alternatives to X,” and “best X for enterprise.” Group them by topic and buyer stage.
3. Run exactly the same prompts across AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI experiences. Because AI answers can vary between runs, compare repeated observations or trends rather than trusting a single query. AI Visibility Snapshot+1
4. Track several metrics, not one score. For each brand, record mention rate (percentage of relevant answers mentioning the brand), AI Share of Voice, recommendation/position, citation rate, cited domains/pages, and optionally sentiment/context. Mention visibility and citation visibility are different—a competitor can be frequently recommended without its own website being frequently cited. Semrush+1

The simplest competitive KPI is:

AI Share of Voice = Your brand mentions ÷ Total mentions of your brand + competitors × 100

For example, suppose across your tracked prompts the answers contain 40 mentions of you, 55 of Competitor A, 25 of B and 80 of C. Your AI Share of Voice is 40 ÷ 200 = 20%. This mention-based approach is commonly used for competitive AI visibility measurement. Semrush+1

The most useful output is usually a matrix like this:

Metric	You	Competitor A	Competitor B
AI Share of Voice	20%	31%	18%
Prompt mention rate	42%	61%	38%
Recommendation presence	28%	47%	24%
Citation presence	16%	32%	19%
Avg. first-mention position	2.4	1.8	3.1

Then drill into prompt-level gaps, because that's where the actionable insight is. For example: “Competitor A appears in 72% of enterprise-security prompts while we appear in 21%.” Next, inspect the sources AI systems cite for those answers. That tells you whether the gap is associated with competitor content, third-party reviews, industry publications, directories, forums, documentation, or other sources. Answer Engines Optimization+1

One important caveat: don't compare headline “AI Visibility Scores” from different tools as though they're equivalent. Vendors use different prompts, engines, competitor universes, weighting, entity matching, and formulas. Your own consistent prompt set and methodology are much more useful for measuring competitive movement over time. Rankvia+1

If you tell me your company/website and 3–5 competitors, I can show you exactly how I'd build the AI visibility competitor scorecard, including the prompts and KPIs to track.