Best tool to track competitors in AI search results
How we track competitors in AI search results for clients: what to measure, how we read share of voice and citations, and the tool we run the work on.
Every client asks who else AI recommends in their category. It is the most natural question in the room, and the one that makes AI search feel real to a leadership team. Here is how we track competitors, and what we have learned about reading the results.
Competitors in AI search are not your SEO competitors
The first surprise for most clients is that the brands named in AI answers are not the same list as the brands that outrank them on Google. Engines pull from review sites, forums, comparison pages and videos. A brand with a modest search presence can dominate answers because of where it is mentioned. So we start from the prompts, not from the SEO competitor list.
Our usual panel has three prompt types: category questions ("best tool for X"), comparison questions ("X vs Y"), and brand questions. Promptwatch supports tagging by type (organic, brand, competitor comparison), which keeps the signal clean. Mixing them produces averages that hide what is going on.
What we measure
- Share of voice. How often each brand appears across the prompt set.
- Position in the answer. Being named first is not the same as being named fourth.
- Sentiment. Promptwatch gives a per-response score from 1 to 100 with a weekly AI summary.
- Citations. Which pages and domains the engines cite for each competitor.
- Gaps. Prompts where a rival is named and the client is not.
Promptwatch also auto-discovers competitors, so we sometimes find a rival the client did not know was showing up. Brand merging helps when one company appears under several names, and a Brand Book with analysis instructions decides what counts as a mention.
How we read the results
A share-of-voice chart is a starting point. The work is in the follow-up.
Look at the citations behind a rival's win. Promptwatch's citation analytics go to page and domain level, with Reddit and YouTube reports and offsite mentions, where a brand is named on a third-party page without a link. Very often the rival wins because of a single comparison page or forum thread. That tells us where to compete.
Track their pages directly. The Page Tracker watches specific URLs, ours or a competitor's, so we can see when a rival's comparison page starts earning citations.
Check the ads. Ads Radar captures sponsored ads inside ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode for tracked prompts, with advertiser, ad copy and landing page. It starts at the Business plan, and it is also on every agency plan. It does not cover Perplexity.
Compare dimensions. The heatmap compares any two dimensions, for example brands against topics or countries. It is the fastest way to show a client where a competitor is strong and they are not.
Closing the gap
Seeing the gap is half the job. For the other half we use content gap analysis, which scores coverage against the prompts where competitors appear, and the Content Agent on Business, which can plan, write and publish against those gaps with a review inbox. For single pages, Content Refresh suggests diff-style updates. The Action Board then gives the client a prioritized list, with a Discovery agent suggesting up to five evidence-backed actions on a weekly schedule.
We also check our own access. If the client's best page is not being fetched by the AI crawlers, content work will not matter. Agent Analytics shows IP-verified crawler logs with errors, and it starts on Professional.
Plan notes
Essential is $95 a month, Professional $245 and Business $579. All paid plans include all active models. If you run several clients, the agency plans (Kick-off $199, Growth $399, Scale $799) include unlimited projects and prompts and 10 seats, and also carry Ads Radar and state and city tracking. They do not include AEO articles or the automated Content Agent.
Other tools we have looked at
We have evaluated the main alternatives. Some enterprise platforms are strong on optimization workflows but meter usage in credits that can run down fast. Some SEO suites have AI add-ons with small prompt allowances and modeled data. Some low-cost trackers cap the number of competitors by plan. What most lack is the layer connecting competitor visibility to crawler logs and conversions.
What to tell clients
- A competitor's share of voice moves around. Judge it over weeks.
- No tool can guarantee that your brand will overtake a rival.
- The outcome is a prioritized list of pages and sources, not a promise.
If you want to see how this works on your own category, Promptwatch is the platform we run client programs on, and its free Explore tier (ChatGPT only, 10 prompts) is a fair place to try your first competitor panel.