Ask any founder who their competitors are and you get a list assembled from sales calls, an old deck and whoever most recently annoyed them. Ask an answer engine the question a buyer would ask, and you get a different list, assembled from whatever the web says about the category.
Both lists matter, and the gap between them is usually the interesting bit. A brand that appears in a third of the answers about your market and nowhere on your competitor list is a real commercial fact discovered by accident.
What gets recorded
- Every brand in every answerNot just the ones on a list. Rivals are discovered from the prose rather than looked up against a set somebody maintains by hand.
- How often, out of how manyA rival count always carries the denominator it is out of, so it can never be compared against a figure counted over a different span.
- Where they turn upWhich questions and which engines name them. A rival that owns one engine and appears nowhere else is a different problem from one that is named everywhere.
Do you check the rivals are real companies?
A named brand that cannot be placed in the answer text and appears nowhere in the prose is dropped as a hallucination rather than reported. Models do occasionally invent a plausible-sounding vendor.
Can I add competitors manually?
You can track named brands deliberately, but the discovery list is not filtered to them. The whole value is in the names nobody thought to add.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.