Competitor Analysis

Compare your AI visibility against competitors.

AI visibility is a competitive landscape. When a user asks an AI system for a recommendation, it typically mentions multiple brands. How you compare to those other brands directly affects whether the user chooses you. IndexMind's Competitor Analysis gives you a head-to-head view of how you stack up against your competitors in AI-generated responses.

What Competitive Analysis Tracks

IndexMind monitors several dimensions of competitive positioning across your probed queries:

  • Citation frequency: How often each competitor is cited compared to you
  • Recommendation rate: When AI systems recommend a solution, who do they recommend most?
  • Sentiment comparison: How the AI's tone differs when discussing you versus competitors
  • Feature comparisons: What specific strengths and weaknesses the AI attributes to each brand
  • Positioning: How the AI frames the competitive landscape (leader vs. alternative vs. niche player)

Battle Cards

Battle cards provide side-by-side comparisons between you and a specific competitor. Each battle card shows:

  • Your score vs. their score across key AI visibility metrics
  • What AI says about you vs. what it says about them for the same queries
  • Strengths and weaknesses the AI attributes to each brand
  • Citation and mention counts for both brands across your probed queries

Battle cards make it easy to see exactly where you are winning and losing against a specific competitor. Use them to identify your biggest competitive gaps and prioritize which ones to address first.

Share of Voice

Share of voice measures how often you appear in AI responses compared to your competitors across all probed queries. It answers the question: "When AI systems talk about my industry, what percentage of the conversation includes my brand?"

A higher share of voice means AI systems are more likely to mention and recommend you. Share of voice is influenced by:

  • The breadth and depth of your content coverage
  • Your domain authority and trust signals
  • How well your structured data communicates your offerings
  • The strength of your brand presence across the web

Tracking share of voice over time helps you see whether your optimization efforts are gaining ground against competitors or falling behind.

Narrative Gaps

Narrative gaps are topics or queries where competitors appear in AI responses but you do not. These are your biggest opportunities for improvement because they represent areas where you are invisible while competitors are visible.

Common causes of narrative gaps include:

  • Missing content: You have not published content addressing the topic
  • Weaker content: Your content exists but is less comprehensive or authoritative than a competitor's
  • Poor discoverability: Your content exists but AI systems cannot find or access it
  • Lack of structured data: Competitors have better schema markup that helps AI systems understand their content

IndexMind identifies narrative gaps automatically and ranks them by potential impact so you can focus on the gaps that matter most.

Narrative Probes

Narrative probes are specialized queries designed to test how AI systems respond to direct comparisons between you and your competitors. These go beyond generic industry queries to ask questions like "How does [Your Brand] compare to [Competitor]?" or "What are the pros and cons of [Your Brand] vs [Competitor]?"

Narrative probe results reveal:

  • Whether the AI has enough information to make a meaningful comparison
  • Which brand the AI positions more favorably in head-to-head comparisons
  • What specific differentiators the AI highlights for each brand
  • Whether the AI's comparison is accurate and up to date

These insights help you understand and shape the comparative narrative AI systems are building about your brand.

Action Items

The Competitor Analysis does not just show you problems. It provides specific action items to close competitive gaps. Based on analysis of your site, your competitor's site, and AI responses, IndexMind generates targeted recommendations such as:

  • Content you should create or improve to fill narrative gaps
  • Structured data to add so AI systems better understand your offerings
  • Authority signals to strengthen in areas where competitors outperform you
  • Specific queries to target with optimized content

Each action item is tied to a specific competitive gap, so you can see exactly what problem it solves and estimate its potential impact.

The Competitor Analysis Tab

The Competitor Analysis tab on your IndexMind dashboard brings all of this together:

  • Overview: A summary of your competitive positioning across all tracked competitors
  • Battle cards: Detailed side-by-side comparisons for each competitor
  • Share of voice: Your visibility percentage relative to the competitive field
  • Narrative gaps: Topics where competitors appear and you do not
  • Deep dives: Drill into any competitor or query for detailed analysis
  • Fix suggestions: Prioritized action items with specific guidance on what to change

Use the Competitor Analysis tab to build a strategic roadmap for improving your AI visibility relative to the competition. As you implement changes and run new probes, the competitive data updates so you can track your progress in real time.