“Who are our competitors?” sounds like a question with an obvious answer. Sales knows the companies it loses deals to. Leadership knows the brands it benchmarks against.
In search and AI answers, the list is often different. The page that takes your place for “best payroll software for restaurants” might be a direct rival, a comparison blog, a marketplace or a forum thread. And it can change by topic, by country and by assistant.
This article gives a method to find out who actually takes your place, where it happens, and what to do about it.
Why the obvious list is incomplete
There are three common gaps between the business view and the search view.
Different players per topic. A company selling accounting software may face one rival on “invoicing” questions and a different one on “expense reports”.
Non-brand sources. Publishers, directories and review platforms often occupy positions and get cited in AI answers without selling anything you sell. They are not competitors in the commercial sense, but they compete for the same attention.
Different players per market. A strong brand in France may be absent in Germany, where a local player dominates. A single global list hides this.
Your own data also has a blind spot. The Search Console performance report shows clicks and impressions for your site in Google Search. It tells you when you lose clicks, not who gained them. For that, you need to observe the results and answers themselves.
Step 1: define the questions and keywords that matter
Start from demand, not from a list of names.
- Google keywords: the 50 to 200 queries that bring qualified traffic or should, grouped by topic.
- AI questions: 20 to 50 natural-language questions a buyer might ask an assistant, such as “Which CRM is easiest for a five-person sales team?” or “Alternatives to [your brand] for small agencies”.
Group both by topic and by stage (discovery, comparison, trust). You will analyze competitors per group, not across everything at once.
Step 2: observe who appears
For each keyword and question, record who appears.
In Google results, note the domains in the top positions. In AI answers, note the brands that are named and the sources that are cited. These are two different signals: a brand can be recommended in an answer while the cited source is a third-party article about it.
After a first pass, you will usually see three groups:
| Group | Description | Typical response |
|---|---|---|
| Direct competitors | Sell the same thing to the same buyers | Benchmark closely, track monthly |
| Intermediaries | Comparison sites, directories, marketplaces | Check how you are listed, request corrections or inclusion |
| Information sources | Media, forums, guides | Earn mentions, contribute where legitimate |
Keep a fixed list of direct competitors for trend tracking. Changing it every month makes share of voice meaningless.
Step 3: measure share of voice by topic
Share of voice is simply your share of presence across a fixed set of queries or questions, compared with the same competitors.
A practical way to compute it for AI answers:
- Ask each tracked question in each assistant you care about.
- Count how many answers name each brand.
- Divide by the number of answers.
Do the same per topic group. A brand that is visible overall can be absent on the one topic that carries your best margin. That is where you want to look first.
For Google, you can use a similar logic with positions: presence in the top 3, top 10 and top 20 for each keyword group, compared with each competitor.
Step 4: find out where and why you lose
Once you know who takes your place, look for the reason. Common patterns:
- They answer the question and you do not. The competitor has a page that directly addresses the question; you have a generic product page.
- They are cited by third parties and you are not. Comparison articles and forum threads name them. AI answers that rely on those sources then tend to name them too. Treat this as an observation to verify on your own questions, not a rule.
- They have more independent authority. More referring domains pointing to the relevant pages can support stronger positions in Google.
- Your pages have technical issues. Broken links, redirect chains or pages that cannot be indexed can keep good content out of results.
- Their reputation is clearer. Recurring positive themes in reviews and mentions give sources something consistent to repeat.
For each lost topic, write one sentence: “Competitor X appears instead of us on topic Y because Z.” If you cannot fill in Z, you need more observation before acting.
Step 5: decide where to respond
You cannot win every topic. Rank the gaps on two axes:
- Value: how much does this topic matter commercially?
- Effort: is the gap a missing page, a technical fix, a reputation issue or an authority gap?
Missing pages and technical fixes are usually faster than authority or reputation work. Start where value is high and the cause is within your control.
A monthly competitor review checklist
- Fixed competitor list unchanged (or changes documented).
- Share of voice in AI answers per topic, compared with last month.
- Top 3 / Top 10 / Top 20 presence per keyword group versus competitors.
- New brands or sources appearing in answers.
- Topics where you lost presence, with a one-line cause.
- Three priorities for next month, each with an owner.
A note on multiple markets
If you operate in several countries or languages, run the analysis per market with questions written in the local language. Translating English questions word for word often misses how people actually search. You may find a different main competitor in each market, and a different reason for each gap.
How SearchFirefly helps
SearchFirefly tracks your questions in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, in each market’s language, and shows the brands named and sources cited per answer, with share of voice against your competitors. It sets this next to your Google positions and Top 3/10/20 movements, a competitor authority comparison based on referring domains, and multi-market views, so prioritized recommendations can focus on the gaps you can close.