Competition Tracking

Track how AI platforms compare your brand to your competitors — share-of-voice, head-to-head queries, and the gaps to close.

Competition tracking is a Professional-and-Agency-tier feature that answers a question your Mention Score doesn’t: when AI is asked about your space, how often are you the brand mentioned versus your competitors? That metric — Share of Voice — is what tells you whether AI views you as the default answer in your category, a fallback option, or an afterthought.

This article covers how to set it up and how to read what it produces.

Plan availability

Competition tracking isn’t included on the Starter plan. If you’re on Starter and want to compare against competitors, the upgrade to Professional unlocks it (along with broader scan budget and team seats — see Account & Team Settings for the full plan comparison).

How it works

Once you’ve added competitors to a domain, every citation scan that runs against your keywords also looks for competitor mentions in the same AI response. That means competition tracking doesn’t require a separate set of scans — it’s a layer on top of the work you’re already doing. Each scan now captures three things instead of one:

1. Whether you got cited (powers your Mention Score)
2. Whether any of your configured competitors got cited (powers Share of Voice)
3. The order brands appeared in the response (used in some weighting logic)

Roll those captures up across your full keyword set and the result is your Share of Voice — the percentage of category-relevant citations that went to you versus competitors.

Adding competitors

In the dashboard, navigate to Competitors in the sidebar. You’ll see two ways to add them:

Manual add. Enter a competitor’s domain and brand name (the name AI is most likely to use when referring to them). The brand name field is optional but recommended — if their domain is acmewidgets.com but everyone calls them “Acme”, enter “Acme” so the matcher catches the casual reference.

AI-assisted generation. Click Generate Competitors and provide your industry and approximate location (e.g., “asphalt additives” + “North America”). CiteMetrix calls one of your AI platforms with that context and returns a suggested list of competitors. You review the list, keep what’s relevant, discard what isn’t, and confirm. This is useful when:

• You’re new to your industry and don’t have a strong sense of who the competitors are in AI’s view
• You suspect AI has a different sense of your competitive set than you do
• You want a quick second opinion on your existing list

The generation is a starting point, not gospel — AI’s idea of who’s relevant in your space sometimes includes adjacent brands you wouldn’t normally compete with, or misses regional players. Treat the suggestions as a sanity check.

How to pick competitors

A few practical rules of thumb:

• Pick brands AI is likely to put alongside you in head-to-head queries. If a customer asks “best asphalt additives,” who else does AI mention? Those are the right competitors to track.
• Stay focused. Three competitors on Pro, ten on Agency. Use the slots for brands that actually matter to your positioning, not every distant competitor in your space.
• Skip dead competitors. If a competitor went out of business or was acquired, leave them off — AI may still have stale references, and tracking that noise distorts the picture.
• Avoid mismatched scale. Comparing a 10-person SaaS to a Fortune 500 produces share numbers you can’t act on. If you must track an outsized competitor, treat their share as context, not as a target.

The Share of Voice page

Once you have at least one competitor configured, navigate to Share of Voice in the sidebar. The page shows a 30-day rolling view of citation distribution across you and your tracked competitors.

Key metrics on the page:

• Overall Share of Voice — your percentage of total citations across all configured competitors. If this number is 60%, you’re being cited 60% of the time when AI mentions anyone in your competitive set.
• By platform — your share broken out by AI platform. Often uneven; you may have 80% share on Perplexity but only 20% on ChatGPT. The platform breakdown points you at where to focus.
• By competitor — head-to-head comparison against each individual competitor. Lets you see who’s actually winning queries against you.
• Queries you won vs queries competitors won — for any given keyword, was the response weighted toward you, toward competitors, or split? “Queries you won” is a particularly useful metric because it’s a clean count, not a percentage.
• Queries with no citations — queries where AI talked about your space but didn’t mention you or any competitor. These are the gaps — content opportunities where neither you nor anyone you track is winning, so the field is wide open.

What “Share of Voice” means in practice

A few patterns worth recognizing:

• High share, narrow keyword set — you’re winning your niche. Watch for share erosion as competitors push into the space.
• High share, broad keyword set — strong category presence. The challenge is maintaining as AI’s training data refreshes; your edge is your work, not AI’s inertia.
• Moderate share, large absolute citation volume — usually the most resilient position. AI sees your space as having multiple legitimate answers and you’re consistently one of them.
• Low share, growing trend — you’re climbing. Most plays look like this in the first 3-6 months of focused AI visibility work.
• Low share, declining trend — investigate. Usually one of: a competitor pushed an aggressive content campaign, AI’s training caught up to a trend you missed, or a hallucination is steering AI away from you (cross-check the Hallucinations panel for the same time window).

A note on the “Without competitors, SoV is 100%” warning

If you have zero competitors configured, the Share of Voice page shows a setup warning rather than data. With no competitors to compare against, your share-of-voice mathematically computes to 100% — every mention of your category goes to you, because there’s nobody else to count. That’s not a useful number. Add two or three competitors and the page becomes meaningful.

What competition tracking doesn’t do

• It doesn’t generate alerts. Unlike scan failures or critical hallucinations, competition shifts don’t fire push notifications or real-time emails. Check the Share of Voice page periodically, or rely on the weekly digest which includes a competition snapshot.
• It doesn’t track competitor sentiment. The tracker counts mentions; it doesn’t analyze whether competitors are spoken of favorably or unfavorably. (CiteMetrix tracks sentiment for your brand, not competitors.)
• It doesn’t measure competitive movement at the SEO or PR level. This is AI-citation-only. Your competitors may be running Google Ads, getting press coverage, or releasing new products — none of which shows up here unless and until AI’s training reflects it.
• It’s not a substitute for competitive research. AI’s view of your competition is one signal. Pricing, product positioning, customer feedback, win/loss data — all still where they were before, none of it tracked here.

Next steps

• If you’re on Pro/Agency, configure your first 2-3 competitors in Competitors in the dashboard sidebar.
• After your next scheduled scan, review Share of Voice for the baseline picture.
• If your share is unexpectedly low on a specific platform, check the Hallucinations panel for the same time window — sometimes AI is steering away from you because of a fixable factual confusion.