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
| Plan | Competitors per domain |
|---|---|
| Solo | 3 |
| Starter | 5 |
| Professional | 10 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
| Agency Small | 3 |
| Agency Medium | 5 |
| Agency Large | 10 |
| Agency Global | Unlimited |
Every paid plan includes competition tracking — the cap scales by tier, per the table above. Need more room than your plan allows? Upgrading raises the cap (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:
- Whether you got cited (powers your Mention Score)
- Whether any of your configured competitors got cited (powers Share of Voice)
- 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. Your tier caps how many competitors you can track (see the table above) — 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 Professional/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.