Tracking competitor AI mentions

Tracking your own brand in LLMs tells you reputation. Tracking competitors tells you market share and where you can take ground. Same prompt set; different aggregations.

Add a competitor

1. AI Visibility → Competitors → Add competitor.
2. Enter brand name. Optionally enter their domain (improves detection accuracy).
3. Optionally enter aliases (different brand spellings, product names).
4. Save. The competitor is automatically scanned across all your existing tracked prompts.

How matching works

For every prompt run, we scan the response text for:

• Exact brand name (case-insensitive).
• Domain (e.g. "ahrefs.com" or links to ahrefs.com pages).
• Aliases you defined.

Match counts increment for any of the three. The mention is recorded with the sentence context (so you can read what the LLM actually said).

Sentiment analysis

For every mention, we classify sentiment as positive, neutral or negative using a fine-tuned classifier. Aggregated views show trend over time per competitor. A competitor whose sentiment drifts negative is often about to lose default-recommendation status – a leading indicator.

The competitive matrix

AI Visibility → Competitors → Matrix. Rows = prompts, columns = your brand + each tracked competitor, cells = mention rate (% of recent runs where the brand was mentioned).

Sort by:

• Your rate descending – where you dominate.
• Specific competitor descending – where they dominate.
• Gap (their rate minus yours) – biggest opportunities.

Detecting new competitors

In each prompt's response text, we surface unfamiliar brand-shaped tokens (capitalized phrases that look like product names but aren't in your tracked list). If the same unfamiliar name appears in 3+ prompts in a week, we suggest adding it.

Alert rules

Set up Slack/email alerts on competitor events:

• Competitor newly mentioned in a prompt where they previously weren't.
• Competitor mention rate jumps or drops by 20%+ week-over-week.
• You surpass a specific competitor on a tracked prompt for the first time.
• Competitor sentiment turns negative.

API access

bash
curl https://api.semoptimiser.com/v1/ai/mentions?competitor=ahrefs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..."