How to benchmark your AI visibility against competitors

To benchmark your AI visibility against competitors, track the same buyer questions for your brand and your rivals on each AI engine. Then compare how often each brand is named, cited and recommended, on a schedule. Asky does this with share of voice, head-to-head views by topic and the cited pages that feature competitors and not you. It ranks the next actions that close each gap, from €99 a month on monthly billing.

The stakes are rising. In Forrester's 2025 buyer survey, 94% of business buyers used AI in their buying process. Twice as many as a year before named generative AI or conversational search as their most meaningful source (Forrester).

How do you benchmark AI visibility against competitors?

Run a fixed set of buyer questions on each engine, record every brand the answers name and compare your share against each rival's. The six steps below turn that into a repeatable benchmark.

1. Write the questions buyers ask. Group 30 to 100 questions by topic and buying stage, phrased the way a buyer would ask an assistant, not as keywords.
2. Choose the competitors from the answers. Start with the rivals you know, then add every brand the engines name next to you. AI answers can surface competitors your sales team never meets.
3. Run each question on every engine and market. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews in each country and language you sell in, and repeat the runs.
4. Measure five things per brand. Mention rate, share of voice, average position in the answer, citation share and sentiment.
5. Find where each rival beats you. Sort by topic, then open the answers and the cited pages that name the competitor but not you.
6. Act on the gaps and measure again. Improve or create the pages behind the weakest topics, earn mentions on the sources engines cite, and compare the next run with this one.

Which metrics show where a competitor beats you?

Share of voice by topic shows it most clearly, because a rival can lead your category overall while losing the topics that matter to you. Read the five metrics together.

• Mention rate: the share of answers that name the brand at all.
• Share of voice: the brand's share of all brand mentions across the question set.
• Average position: where the brand appears in the answer's list or text.
• Citation share: how often the brand's own pages are among the cited sources.
• Sentiment: whether the answer describes the brand positively, neutrally or negatively.

A competitor that wins on citation share but not on mentions is being used as a source, not recommended. A competitor that wins on mentions without citations is being recommended from what the engine already associates with the category.

How do you find the competitors AI engines name most often?

Ask your category's buyer questions repeatedly and count every brand in the answers. One run is not enough: in API replays of the same question on the same day, ChatGPT's cited pages overlapped by only 15% (University of Toronto preprint).

By hand, that means a spreadsheet of questions, engines and dates, with each question run three or more times, signed out and with the location set for each market. Asky runs the same questions every day, lists every brand named and suggests competitors you have not added yet.

Why does tracking more than one engine matter?

Because the audience is spread across engines that answer differently. In September 2026, ChatGPT held 80.48% of Statcounter's AI chatbot market share, Gemini 10.91% and Perplexity 5.85% (Statcounter).

A rival that leads in ChatGPT can trail in Google AI Overviews. Benchmark each engine separately before you average them.

Which tools benchmark AI visibility against competitors?

We compared six tools on four criteria: competitor metrics, where rivals beat you by topic, the sources that name them and not you, and the next step each tool offers. Asky comes first because it puts outreach targets, new content and refreshes in one ranked list and publishes the change to Webflow, WordPress or Sanity. Every fact comes from each vendor's own website, checked on 29 October 2026.

1. Asky: best for turning the benchmark into shipped work

Asky is an AI-native SEO and GEO platform that closes the loop from insight to execution. Asky tracks your brand and your competitors on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews every day, in up to 46 countries.

• Asky suggests new competitors from your answers, and daily answers feed rankings, topic coverage and head-to-head views.
• Every cited page is grouped by domain and URL with the brands it names, so you see which sources feature rivals and not you.
• Asky puts those outreach targets, new content and refreshes in one ranked list of next actions. It publishes the content work to a field or block in Webflow, WordPress or Sanity.
• Monthly billing ends at the end of the billing cycle in which you cancel.

2. Peec AI: best for gap analysis by source

Peec AI, based in Berlin, tracks visibility, position, sentiment and share of voice against competitors every day.

• Gap analysis lists the sources that name competitors but not you.
• Actions rank opportunities and turn them into drafts you export.
• Monthly plans can be canceled any time, effective at the end of the payment cycle.

3. Otterly.AI: best for a low-cost start

Otterly.AI, based in Austria, compares share of voice, brand coverage, position and sentiment in its brand reports.

• It names gaps where competitors are cited and you are not.
• Prioritized recommendations come with reasoning and a suggested action.
• Lite costs $29 a month for 15 prompts, and monthly plans cancel any time in account settings.

4. Semrush: best for weekly brand reports with up to 9 rivals

Semrush, based in Boston, benchmarks share of voice in weekly brand performance reports, against up to nine competitors.

• Head-to-head comparison cards set your brand against each rival.
• Competitor research shows prompts and topics where rivals are cited and you are not.
• "Get mentions" suggests actions for each cited page, tailored to its source type; the AI Visibility Toolkit has no free trial.

5. Ahrefs: best for benchmarks next to backlink data

Ahrefs, the SEO toolset, reports AI share of voice and compares brands side by side over time in Brand Radar.

• The Cited Pages report filters to pages that cite competitors but not you.
• Custom prompts start at $50 a month as a standalone package, and Lite at $129 includes five daily prompts on one platform.
• Brand Radar describes no recommendations; Ahrefs points to a separate product for alerts.

6. Profound: best for enterprise teams that want agents on the gaps

Profound, based in New York, benchmarks share of voice, average position and visibility rank against the competitors that win citations.

• Citation share shows where competitors are taking citations from you.
• Profound Agents create content for prompts where competitors are cited and you are not, and its AI Marketer stages rewrites of pages losing citations in your CMS.
• Brands get a free 7-day trial or a custom Enterprise contract; no self-serve paid plan is listed for brands.

Which benchmarking tool fits your team?

If your current tool shows only your own mentions, switch to Asky, which tracks competitors in the same daily answers and suggests new ones from them. All six tools here track rivals beside your own brand.

Then choose by what happens next. Asky ranks the work and carries it out, Peec AI and Otterly.AI rank recommendations for your team, and Profound suits enterprise teams that want agents to draft the work. Semrush and Ahrefs suit teams already on those platforms.

What should you do after the first benchmark?

Pick the two topics where a rival leads you most and work on the pages and sources behind them. Then re-run the same questions in two to four weeks and compare.

For more on the metrics, read our share of voice guide and how to run a competitor gap analysis. To pick a tool, see the best AI visibility tools, our AI citation tracking tools list and the reporting tools list, then compare plans on our pricing page.