Competitors
Competitors are the brands that show up instead of you when AI answers questions about your category. Tracking them lets you measure your Share of Voice and understand exactly who you're losing to.
Why Competitors Matter
When someone asks ChatGPT "best running shoes for marathon training" and it recommends Nike, Hoka, and ASICS but not you — those three brands are your competitors in that AI context. Knowing who consistently beats you is the first step to changing it.
Competitor tracking powers two core capabilities: Share of Voice (what percentage of AI recommendations go to you vs each competitor) and benchmarking (how your visibility trends compare to theirs over time).
Auto-Derived During Onboarding
When you onboard a project, A2Z Reach crawls your site, identifies your category, and automatically derives a set of likely competitors. For a running shoe brand, this might surface Nike, Hoka, On, ASICS, and Brooks without any manual input.
These auto-derived competitors come from analyzing which brands AI engines consistently mention alongside your category keywords. You can keep them, remove irrelevant ones, or add others.
Managing Competitors
You have full control over your competitor list:
- Add: Manually add any brand you want to track — including emerging competitors AI hasn't surfaced yet
- Edit: Update names, domains, or aliases as brands evolve
- Remove: Soft-delete competitors that are no longer relevant (historical data is preserved)
Competitor Fields
| Name | Domain | Aliases | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nike | nike.com | Nike Running | active |
| Hoka | hoka.com | Hoka One One | active |
| On | on.com | On Running, On Cloud | active |
| ASICS | asics.com | Asics Running | active |
| Brooks | brooksrunning.com | Brooks Running | active |
How Aliases Work
AI engines refer to brands inconsistently. A response might say "On", "On Running", or "On Cloud" — all meaning the same competitor. Aliases ensure every variation is matched correctly to one competitor entity.
Without aliases, "On Cloud" mentions would be missed entirely, understating that competitor's true Share of Voice. The more aliases you add, the more accurate your competitive intelligence becomes.
Powering Share of Voice & Benchmarking
Every time a tracked prompt is captured, A2Z Reach checks the AI response for mentions of you AND each competitor. This builds a complete picture:
- Share of Voice: Across all captures, what percentage mentioned you vs Nike vs Hoka vs On?
- Topic-level gaps: You dominate "trail running" but lose on "marathon training" — competitor data reveals where to focus
- Trend lines: Is Hoka gaining ground? Is your GEO strategy closing the gap with Nike?
Without competitors defined, visibility is just a number. With them, it's a competitive map.