Analyze competitors in AI Search (Platform: Investigate Competitors with Conductor)

Do you know who's winning the conversations in AI search — and on which specific topics? This lesson walks you through the Competitive Landscape tab in AI Search Performance to understand your Share of Voice, identify the competitors dominating your most important topics, and build a targeted action plan to fight back. 

Topics include:

• Setting the right filter context: Branded vs. Unbranded prompts

• Reading your Share of Voice KPI cards and benchmarking against the entire market vs. tracked competitors

• Using the Top Mentioned Brands table to understand who's winning — and how they're perceived

• Reading the Competitive Landscape by Top Topics to see who wins each specific topic

• Clicking into a competitor's topic performance to explore the underlying prompts

• Using global Intent and Persona filters for audience-specific competitive intelligence

• Using Branded prompts to identify PR and partnership opportunities

🔁 Seen this video before? If you've already completed the AI Search Performance course, feel free to skip ahead.  

Step-by-step

Here are the steps we cover in the video, with relevant links to more information. Be sure to watch to get more context and decision support for potential choices you might have to make as you go: 

1. Navigate to the Competitive Landscape tab in AI Search Performance ↗️ (Performance > AI Search > Competitive Landscape).

2. Set your Prompt Type filter to Unbranded before analyzing the competitive landscape. Unbranded prompts represent general category queries — the true competitive field where brands are competing purely on content authority, not brand recognition. This is the most meaningful context for head-to-head competitive analysis.

3. Use the Entire Market / Tracked Competitors toggle to control the scope of your analysis:

   • Entire Market — shows every brand appearing in AI responses across your tracked topics, giving you a broad market view.

   • Tracked Competitors — focuses the view on the specific brands you've configured as competitors, making for a cleaner head-to-head comparison.

4. Review the two KPI cards at the top — Brand Mentions and Website Citations — showing your Share of Voice as a percentage of the market, with period-over-period change.

5. Review the Your Brand Mention Share of Voice widget — a trend line of your SOV over time. Click Explore to drill into the data and customize the competitor view.

6. Review the Top Mentioned Brands table. This shows the brands most frequently mentioned in AI responses, alongside their Sentiment Score and Prompts with Mentions count. A competitor with high mentions but a lower sentiment score has a visibility advantage but a perception vulnerability — a useful signal for your positioning strategy.

7. Scroll to Competitive Landscape by Top Topics. This grid shows which brands are winning each of your tracked topics, ranked by frequency of mention. Scan across your priority topics to identify where you're strong, where a specific competitor consistently dominates, and where you're absent entirely.

8. Hover over any competitor's logo in the grid to see a quick tooltip with their mention count and period-over-period change. Click the logo to open a Prompts with Mentions modal pre-filtered to that competitor and topic. In this modal you can see:

   • The specific prompts where that competitor is mentioned

   • Whether your brand is mentioned in those same prompts

   • Period-over-period change for each prompt

9. In the modal, identify prompts where the competitor is mentioned but you are not. Click the three-dot menu on any prompt and select Go to Writing Assistant to kick off content creation targeting that gap.

10. Apply a Persona or Intent global filter to get audience-specific competitive intelligence. The competitive landscape can look very different depending on which audience or need state you're analyzing — a relatively weak competitor overall may actually dominate with a specific persona you care about.

11. For a different type of competitive intelligence, switch the Prompt Type filter to Branded and toggle to view the Entire Market. This shows which third-party publishers and sites are most cited alongside your brand name in branded queries. These are potential PR and partnership targets — sites AI already trusts to discuss your brand category.

Related Resources

• AI Search Performance Support Article

• AI Search FAQs