Competitors

Overview#

Competitor analysis runs rival brands through exactly the same prompts you are measured on, so what you get back is a like-for-like comparison rather than two separate reports laid next to each other and squinted at.

The comparison carries more weight here than it would in traditional search. A results page has ten positions on it and you can comfortably occupy one of them; an AI answer typically names three brands and moves on. Fourth place is not a weaker showing, it is absence, and that is why your position relative to everyone else ends up being the number that matters.

Choosing who is tracked#

Select Competitors is where you manage the tracked list. Seerly proposes likely competitors based on your category, and you decide which of them actually get measured. Do this before you read anything else on the screen, because every comparison here is drawn against that list, and the wrong list will give you a beautifully precise measurement of a race you are not running.

All Competitors shows everything available to you. Anything you would rather not measure can be Excluded, and No entities have been excluded confirms the list is clean when it is. Reset to Default puts Seerly's own selection back if you want to start again.

Select Competitors

All Competitors

everything Seerly identified in your category

Excluded

entities you have removed from measurement

Indirect

competes for the same answers without selling the same thing

Reset to Default

back to Seerly's own selection

Brands marked Indirect compete for the same answers without selling quite the same thing, and they are worth keeping in. In an AI answer an indirect competitor occupies the slot every bit as effectively as a direct one does, so excluding them tends to flatter your numbers without changing your situation.

If the screen says No competitors tracked yet, none of what follows will mean anything until you pick some.

Panels and controls#

Share of voice measures your presence against the tracked set on the same prompts. It is a different question from the one Visibility answers: Visibility asks whether you show up at all, while share of voice asks whether you show up instead of your competitors. The two can comfortably move in opposite directions, and often do. Your own visibility can improve over a month while your share slips, simply because somebody else improved faster.

Competitor Citations names whose content is getting referenced, which tends to be the most useful thing on the screen because it points at specific pages rather than general standing. Most Effective Content Patterns then looks across those winning pages for what they have in common and lists what it finds, ranked, as a short set of statements you can act on rather than a score. All Content Patterns, All Types and Source Types filter and group it, and Show All opens the full list where there are more than a handful.

Beside it, Structure Analysis counts how many of the analysed pages use each of a fixed set of structural patterns. This is the more mechanical of the two panels and frequently the more immediately useful, because it turns "their content is better" into a specific thing yours does not do. Competitive Intelligence gathers all of it into a summary view.

Structure Analysis

How many of the analysed pages use each pattern

Pattern	Pages
Comparisons	8
Structured Data	9
Real Examples	7
Tables	6
Lists	9
Technical Details	4
Code Snippets	1

Interpreting results#

Read this per topic and not as a single verdict. An overall deficit is almost never spread evenly, and what you usually find underneath it is a handful of topics where you compete perfectly well and a handful where you simply are not there. The second group is the work.

Watch for concentration while you are in there. When one competitor seems to own a topic, that ownership usually rests on a small number of pages that keep getting cited, not on an enormous content operation you could never match. A small number of pages is a beatable thing.

It is also worth checking whether either of you is winning. Quite often the page being cited belongs to a review site or a directory rather than to a competitor, in which case getting yourself listed there is a faster route than trying to out-publish anybody.

Finally, names you do not recognise are useful information rather than noise. If brands you have never heard of are dominating your topics, either the topics have drifted away from what you sell or there is a competitor you have not been paying attention to, and you would want to know about either one.

Best practices#

• Strength where you actually sell. Being genuinely present in the topics that produce revenue beats being mediocre across all of them.
• Share of voice moving your way over several runs, which tells you far more than any single reading.
• A competitor list you recognise, revisited every so often rather than set once and forgotten.

Next steps#

1. Confirm the tracked list, since everything downstream depends on it.
2. Find the topics where a single competitor dominates and open them up.
3. Read Most Effective Content Patterns for those topics. Format and specificity move the needle here more than volume does, and this is the panel that tells you which format.
4. Check whether the winner is even a competitor. If it turns out to be a directory or a review site, getting listed is the cheaper move by a distance.
5. Follow change rather than position. Share moving steadily toward you across several runs is the sign the work is landing.

Limitations#

Everything here is measured against the competitors you selected, so the picture is only as good as that list. A rival nobody added is invisible, and looks exactly like a rival who is not competing with you.

The patterns panel describes what winning pages have in common; it does not prove those features are why they win. Treat it as a well-informed starting point for a brief rather than a formula.