We just shipped Competitor Tracking to AI Search Visibility, so you can compare rival brands' mention share, citations and prompt coverage directly against your own across every AI engine we track. You add the competitors you care about; WriteWorks runs them through the same prompt set as your brand and reports the results side by side. It's built for growth and search-marketing leaders who need to know not just whether they're visible, but who is being recommended instead.

Knowing your own AI-search visibility number tells you half the story. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Copilot answers a buying question, the answer usually names two or three brands - and if you're not one of them, someone else is. Competitor Tracking closes that gap.

What is Competitor Tracking?

Competitor Tracking is a comparison view inside WriteWorks that measures named rival brands against your own across the same tracked prompts and AI engines. Instead of guessing who occupies the answers you're missing, you see a ranked table of brands with their mention share, citation counts and prompt coverage for the period you select.

The competitors you add are tracked continuously, not just at the moment you check. That means you can watch a rival's position move over weeks rather than taking a single snapshot and treating it as a trend.

How Competitor Tracking works

Competitor Tracking runs on the same prompt set that powers your brand's visibility scores. When WriteWorks queries an engine with one of your tracked prompts, it parses the response for every brand you've registered - yours and your competitors' - and records who was mentioned, in what order, and which sources the engine cited to support the answer.

Three measures are reported for each brand:

  • Mention share - the proportion of tracked responses in which the brand appears, expressed against the full competitor set. This is the headline competitor share of voice figure.
  • Citations - the domains and URLs an engine referenced when it produced an answer containing that brand, which shows you the evidence base the engine is leaning on.
  • Prompt coverage - which specific prompts a brand appears for, so you can see whether a rival owns comparison queries, category definitions, or "best tool for X" style questions.

Results are broken out by engine, because visibility rarely transfers cleanly between them. A brand that dominates Perplexity answers may be almost absent from Google AI Overviews, and the reason is usually a difference in which sources each engine leans on. Google's own documentation on AI features in Search is explicit that AI Overviews surface links to supporting sources - which is why citation-level data, not just mention counts, is the useful unit of analysis.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. AI engines are non-deterministic, so responses vary between runs; treat the trend over a period as the signal, not any single response. And Competitor Tracking measures what engines say about brands you've named - it won't automatically discover competitors you haven't added.

Who Competitor Tracking is for

It's especially useful if you:

  • Sell in a category where AI answers routinely list three to five vendors and you need to know your position within that set.
  • Are launching against an incumbent and want evidence of whether AI engines still default to them.
  • Run AI competitor monitoring as a standing part of your reporting and need a repeatable, engine-by-engine view.
  • Manage several brands or clients and need consistent competitive baselines for each.
  • Need to justify content investment by showing which rival is winning which specific prompts.

Advanced users benefit too: if you already track your own citations closely, the competitor view tells you which publishers, review sites and communities are shaping the answers you're losing.

What Competitor Tracking changes

The practical shift is that "we're not visible enough" becomes a specific, actionable statement: we're absent from eleven comparison prompts on ChatGPT where two named rivals appear, and the answers cite three review sites we have no presence on.

That changes what you brief. Instead of writing more content in general, you can target the prompts where a competitor holds the answer, and the sources those answers draw from. It pairs naturally with citation gap analysis, which identifies the domains citing rivals but not you.

How to set up Competitor Tracking

1. Open AI Search Visibility in your workspace and go to the Competitors section.

2. Select Add competitor and enter the brand name, plus its primary domain so citations can be attributed correctly.

3. Repeat for each rival you want in the comparison set. Keep the set tight - direct competitors give cleaner share figures than a long tail of adjacent brands.

4. Confirm your tracked prompt set covers the questions where competitive answers actually appear, adjusting it with prompt research if there are gaps.

5. Save, then let a full tracking cycle run before drawing conclusions.

6. Return to the Competitors view and filter by engine, prompt or date range to see where each brand stands.

Availability: Competitor Tracking is available in the AI Search Visibility area of the WriteWorks platform. 

Tips for a better result

  • Add the competitors your buyers actually shortlist, not the ones you benchmark against internally - AI answers reflect buyer language.
  • Include at least a few comparison and "alternatives to" prompts; these are where competitive displacement shows up most clearly.
  • Review citations alongside mention share. A rival with high visibility and a narrow citation base is more contestable than one cited by dozens of independent sources.
  • Cross-reference with brand and competitor sentiment - being mentioned frequently but described unfavourably is a different problem from being absent.

Frequently asked questions

How many competitors can I track?

You add competitors individually in the Competitors section of AI Search Visibility, and each is measured across the same tracked prompt set as your own brand. Limits depend on your plan, so check current allowances on the WriteWorks pricing page before building a large comparison set.

Which AI engines does Competitor Tracking cover?

Competitor Tracking runs across the same AI engines WriteWorks already tracks for your own brand, including major assistants and Google AI Overviews. Because each engine draws on different sources, results are reported per engine rather than blended into a single score, so you can act on engine-specific gaps.

Does mention share mean the same thing as market share?

No. Mention share measures how often a brand appears in AI responses to your tracked prompts, relative to the competitor set you defined. It reflects visibility within AI answers only, and will differ from commercial market share, organic search rankings or brand awareness measured by other methods.

Can I see why a competitor is being recommended?

Partly. Competitor Tracking shows which sources engines cited in answers naming that brand, which usually points to the publishers, directories or communities shaping the recommendation. Reviewing that alongside citation tracking across AI engines gives you the clearest picture of the evidence base behind an answer.

Competitor Tracking turns AI-search visibility from a single self-reported number into a comparison you can act on: who is named instead of you, on which engine, for which prompt, and on the strength of which sources.

If you'd like to see where you sit in your own category's AI answers, add two or three direct rivals in the Competitors section and let a full tracking cycle run.