How do I monitor our share of AI answers against competitors?

To monitor your share of AI answers against competitors, track how often your brand is cited, recommended, or ranked in AI-generated responses for the topics that matter to you. A practical approach is:

1) Define the “share” you care about

Pick one or more of these:

• Citation share: how often your brand/source is mentioned
• Recommendation share: how often your brand is suggested as a top option
• Visibility share: how often your brand appears anywhere in the answer
• Answer share by topic: share across key product categories, use cases, or queries

2) Build a query set

Create a list of 50–500 prompts based on:

• High-intent buyer questions
• Category/comparison queries
• Problem/solution queries
• “Best X for Y” prompts
• Competitor comparison prompts

Example:

• “Best CRM for small sales teams”
• “HubSpot vs Salesforce for startups”
• “How to reduce cloud spend”

3) Test major AI surfaces

Check the prompts across:

• ChatGPT
• Google AI Overviews / Search generative results
• Perplexity
• Claude
• Gemini
• Bing/Copilot
• Any vertical AI tools relevant to your category

4) Score each response

For each prompt, record:

• Which brands are mentioned
• Position/order of mention
• Whether your brand is recommended
• Whether competitors are recommended instead
• Sentiment/qualifiers
• Whether the answer includes citations and which sources are used

A simple scoring model:

• 1 point = brand mentioned
• 2 points = brand recommended
• 3 points = brand recommended first Then compute your share as:
• Your score / total competitor score for that query set

5) Measure over time

Track weekly or monthly:

• Share by topic
• Share by platform
• Share vs each competitor
• Changes after content, PR, SEO, or product updates

6) Use the right data sources

Combine:

• Manual prompt testing for a small sample
• Automated rank/answer monitoring tools
• Search and citation analytics
• Website crawl/indexation signals
• Brand mention monitoring from AI answer engines

7) Turn it into a dashboard

Useful views:

• Overall AI answer share
• Share by competitor
• Share by topic
• Share by platform
• Citation source map
• Top prompts where you lose share
• Prompts where you’re consistently first

8) Improve your share

If you’re underrepresented, optimize for:

• Clear comparison pages
• Strong category pages
• FAQ content that answers specific buyer questions
• Third-party mentions and reviews
• Structured data
• Authoritative, factual content
• PR and thought leadership in cited publications

Simple formula

If on 100 tracked prompts:

• Your brand appears in 40 answers
• Competitor A appears in 55
• Competitor B appears in 30

Your visibility share could be:

• 40 / (40 + 55 + 30) = 31.7%

If you want, I can give you:

1. a spreadsheet template for tracking AI answer share, or
2. a methodology for measuring it automatically.