Overview: Competitors

The Competitors tab in Writesonic's GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) solution provides a comprehensive analysis of your competitive landscape, helping you understand where you stand against other brands targeting similar audiences and topics. This intelligence enables data-driven decisions to improve your visibility in AI-generated responses.

Best Competitor

What this shows:

The Best Competitor section spotlights the brand achieving the highest visibility score among all tracked competitors. This metric represents the percentage of times this competitor appears in AI-generated responses when users ask questions related to your industry or topic areas.

A competitor showing 53% visibility, for instance, means they appear in more than half of all relevant AI responses—making them the dominant voice in your space.

Why it matters:

Understanding your top-performing competitor provides a strategic benchmark for your own GEO efforts. This insight reveals what's possible in your industry and helps you set realistic yet ambitious goals. By analyzing their content strategy, you can identify patterns in the types of content that resonate with AI systems—whether it's comprehensive guides, authoritative data, or specific content formats.

Weakest Competitor

What this shows:

The Weakest Competitor metric identifies the brand with the lowest visibility percentage in your competitive set. This score reflects minimal presence in AI-generated responses, indicating that despite being in the same industry, this competitor struggles to gain traction with generative engines.

Low visibility often signals content that lacks depth, authority, or proper optimization for AI consumption. It might also indicate outdated information, poor technical implementation, or a failure to address the questions and topics that matter most to your shared audience.

Why it matters:

While it might seem counterintuitive, analyzing your weakest competitor offers valuable strategic insights. Their low performance helps establish the baseline in your industry—showing you what definitely doesn't work. This understanding prevents you from making similar mistakes and wasting resources on ineffective strategies.

Suggested Competitors

What this shows:

This dynamic section identifies brands that frequently appear alongside yours in AI responses, even though you haven't explicitly added them to your tracking list. These suggestions are based on co-occurrence patterns—when AI systems answer questions about your industry, these brands consistently appear in the same responses as yours.

Each suggested competitor displays their mention count, showing how many times they've appeared in prompts relevant to your brand. This data comes from analyzing thousands of AI interactions, identifying patterns that might not be immediately obvious through traditional competitive analysis.

Why it matters:

Suggested competitors often reveal blind spots in your competitive strategy. These might include:

• Emerging players who've recently entered your space with strong content
• Adjacent brands from related industries that compete for the same audience attention
• Niche specialists dominating specific topics within your broader industry
• International competitors you hadn't considered in your local market focus

By monitoring these suggestions, you stay ahead of shifting competitive dynamics. A brand that appears as a suggestion today might become your primary competitor tomorrow. Adding relevant suggestions to your tracked competitors ensures your GEO strategy remains comprehensive and responsive to market changes.

Competitor Analysis

What this shows:

This comprehensive table presents a multi-dimensional view of your competitive landscape, displaying each tracked competitor's performance across critical metrics. The table combines visibility percentages with engagement indicators to provide a complete picture of competitive positioning.

Each row represents a competitor and includes:

• Visibility percentage: Their overall share of voice in AI responses, with trend arrows showing whether they're gaining or losing ground
• Pages cited: The total number of unique pages from their domain that AI systems reference, indicating content breadth and authority
• Mentions: Cumulative appearances across all monitored topics, reflecting overall brand presence

The trend indicators (upward or downward arrows) show recent performance changes, helping you spot momentum shifts before they become significant gaps or opportunities. Color-coded metrics enable quick visual scanning—green typically indicates growth, while red signals decline.

Why it matters:

This holistic view transforms raw data into actionable intelligence. By comparing visibility percentages, you understand relative market position. Pages cited reveals content depth—a competitor with high visibility but few pages cited might be vulnerable to a comprehensive content strategy. Conversely, many cited pages with low visibility might indicate optimization opportunities.

The mention counts provide volume context. A competitor might have lower visibility percentage but higher absolute mentions, suggesting they compete in a broader range of topics. This insight helps you decide whether to specialize deeply or expand your topical coverage.

Tracking these metrics over time reveals strategic shifts in your industry. Sudden changes in a competitor's metrics might indicate new content initiatives, technical improvements, or algorithm updates that you should investigate and potentially adapt to your own strategy.

Topic-wise Visibility Across Competitors

What this shows:

This granular matrix breaks down competitive performance by individual topics, revealing exactly where each brand dominates or struggles. Rather than aggregate visibility, this view shows percentage scores for each competitor across specific subject areas relevant to your industry.

The table structure presents topics as rows and competitors as columns, with each intersection showing that competitor's visibility percentage for that specific topic. Performance indicators (arrows and color coding) immediately highlight strengths and weaknesses. A competitor might show 90% visibility for "AI-powered design automation" but only 10% for "document design," revealing their content focus and expertise areas.

Empty cells or 0% values indicate complete absence from AI responses for that topic—potentially representing untapped opportunities. Conversely, topics where multiple competitors show high percentages indicate highly competitive areas requiring exceptional content to break through.

Why it matters:

Topic-level visibility analysis enables precision targeting in your GEO strategy. Instead of competing everywhere, you can make strategic decisions about where to focus your efforts:

• Quick wins: Topics with low competition where modest effort could establish dominance
• Strategic battles: High-value topics worth competing for despite strong competition
• Defensive positions: Topics where you currently lead but face growing competition
• Expansion opportunities: Adjacent topics where your expertise could naturally extend

This granular view also reveals competitor content strategies. A competitor focusing on technical topics while ignoring creative applications might be leaving an entire audience segment underserved. These patterns help you position your brand uniquely, finding the intersection of audience need and competitive opportunity.

Furthermore, tracking topic-level changes over time shows how the competitive landscape evolves. New topics emerging in the matrix might signal industry trends, while declining visibility across all competitors for certain topics might indicate shifting user interests or AI algorithm changes.

FAQs

Q: Can I customize which competitors I track?
A: Absolutely. You can add competitors using the "Add" button next to suggested competitors or remove existing ones through your settings. We recommend tracking 4-8 direct competitors for optimal insights without overwhelming your analysis.

Q: What exactly does visibility percentage represent?
A: Visibility percentage measures how often a brand appears in AI-generated responses compared to all possible appearances for monitored queries. If you track 100 relevant prompts and a competitor appears in 53 of the responses, they have 53% visibility. This includes direct citations, mentions, and references to their content.

Q: How should I interpret the suggested competitors section?
A: Suggested competitors are brands that consistently appear alongside yours in AI responses. High mention counts indicate strong topical overlap. Consider adding them to your tracked competitors if they represent direct competition for your target audience or if they're capturing visibility you should be earning.

Q: How can I use topic-wise visibility to improve my strategy?
A: Focus on three key areas: defend topics where you currently lead, attack topics with high value but low overall competition, and build content for emerging topics before they become saturated. Use the data to allocate resources proportionally to opportunity size and competitive intensity.

Q: Can I export this competitive data for presentations or deeper analysis?
A: Yes, all competitive intelligence data can be exported in various formats for reporting, presentation, or advanced analysis. Look for export options within each section to download data in your preferred format.

Q: What should I do if my visibility is significantly lower than competitors?
A: Start by analyzing the topic-wise breakdown to identify specific gaps. Focus initial efforts on topics with lower competition where you can build authority quickly. Examine high-performing competitor content to understand what makes it valuable to AI systems, then create superior, more comprehensive resources targeting the same user needs.