AI Competitor Analysis Service

What the AI Competitor Analysis delivers

One written competitor gap report, built from four measurements aimed at your rivals rather than at you. This is a diagnostic deliverable, not a retainer. You keep the report whether or not you ever work with us again. The whole engagement runs under Vector 1, Diagnose, pointed outward at the competitive field.

1. Each competitor's citation rate, per engine. We run the buyer prompts that lead to a sale in your category against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and record how often each engine names each of your competitors. This is the field reading: who the machines actually recommend, engine by engine, not who you assume is ahead.
2. The source behind every competitor citation. For each engine, we capture the exact domain it grounded on when it named your rival: the directory, the review platform, the Knowledge Graph entry, their own page. This is the part a single screenshot never shows. It is the difference between knowing a competitor is winning and knowing the specific door they walked through to win.
3. The consensus gap on your category. Because the four engines read largely different sources, a competitor can own one engine and be invisible in another. We report where that split falls for your category, so you can see whether a rival's lead is broad or concentrated in one engine you could contest.
4. Your position, beside theirs, and the roadmap to close it. We place your own citation rate next to each competitor's and map every gap to the 12 Vectors, ranked by effort against impact. The roadmap is the bridge from this snapshot to actual work: which sources to earn, which signals to build, and in what order.

Your competitors, not your own domain: how this differs from the audit

This service and the AI Visibility Audit use the same four-engine instruments, but they point them at different subjects. The distinction matters because it changes the question being answered.

Why your competitor gets cited and you do not

The common assumption is that a cited competitor is simply bigger or better known. Often they are not. They are present in the one source a given engine happened to ground on, and you are absent from it. And the sources differ sharply by engine, which is the finding that makes this analysis worth running.

Independent studies point the same way. Search Engine Land reports that ChatGPT citations concentrate among a small group of domains, and work on the citation gap finds that AI engines routinely recommend a buyer's competitor while ignoring the buyer, for reasons that come down to source presence rather than quality. The analysis turns that pattern into a named list: the exact sources your rivals occupy and you do not.

Who this analysis is for

Why this beats typing your rival's name into ChatGPT once

Anyone can ask ChatGPT "who are the best plumbers in my city" and read which competitor it names. That is an anecdote from one engine on one day. Two structural choices separate this analysis from that screenshot.

Because the same 12-Vector methodology that scores the gap is the framework we use to close it, the roadmap is directly actionable: the specific sources and signals your situation needs, in priority order. You can read the framework in full at the 12 Vectors overview.

Proof: where closing the gap can lead

What it costs and what comes next

The AI Competitor Analysis itself is delivered free, as a no-obligation diagnostic. There is no tier to choose for the analysis. The tiers apply only if you decide to act on the roadmap with us afterward.

How we run the analysis (engineering view)

The honest version of "what does competitor analysis actually measure." We do not say "we will study your competitors." We name each measurement and the signal it reads, pointed at the competitive set.

• Competitor set definition: we confirm the three rivals to profile, or identify the businesses the engines actually treat as your competitors for your buyer prompts, which is frequently a different set than the ones you track yourself.
• Buyer-prompt construction: we build the real decision prompts for your category and location, the "best {your category} in {your city}" and problem-led questions, so the read reflects the queries that precede a purchase rather than brand-name lookups.
• Multi-engine competitor sampling (Vector 1, Diagnose): each prompt is run against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, recording which competitor is named, the position they hold inside the answer, and how often.
• Source extraction per citation: for every competitor mention we capture the cited domain, the directory, review platform, Knowledge Graph entry, or page each engine grounded on, because that source is the thing you would have to enter to contest the position.
• Consensus-gap read: we measure how concentrated or split each competitor's lead is across the four engines for your category, drawing on the same first-party method behind our 83.7% unique-source finding.
• Gap synthesis (Vector 2, Anchor and Vector 6, Structure): we compare your entity and schema signals against the cited competitors', then map every gap to its Vector and rank it by impact against effort, producing the prioritized plan you keep.

If you move from this one-time competitive read into watching the field over time, those same per-competitor metrics become tracked signals inside AI Citation Monitoring. The analysis defines the competitive baseline; monitoring watches it move.

How to get started

One step: book the free analysis. We agree the competitor set and prompt list on a short kickoff call, run the four-engine read across your rivals, and deliver the written competitor gap report inside seven business days. You decide from there. No sales-pressure follow-up. No dark-pattern email sequences. If the report shows the gap is small enough to close yourself, we tell you that plainly.

The analysis measures a point in time. AI engines update their grounding sources continually, so a competitive snapshot ages; treat it as a baseline, not a permanent verdict. Any outcome from acting on the roadmap depends on industry, competition, and your existing digital presence, and past results for our clients do not guarantee identical ones.