This tutorial shows how to use Genezio to monitor a competitor correctly and calmly.

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1. Let the answers name the competitors

Genezio extracts competitors from the answers. Thus, start with the brands that answer engines actually put next to you. Read Extracting competitors. Expect a surprise. The brands that an answer engine treats as alternatives are not always the brands that win deals against you. Also, a brand that wins in AI answers today usually occurs in your sales pipeline later.

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2. Clean the list

Remove adjacent categories, parent companies, and brands with the same name. They distort Share of voice, which divides the conversation among all the listed brands.

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3. Read the grid, not the ranking

In Competitor comparison, the useful signal is the combination of the two scores:
  • High visibility, low recommendation: answer engines know the brand, but they do not prefer it.
  • Low visibility, high recommendation: dangerous. When answer engines show this brand, they recommend it convincingly.
  • High on both: the brand to beat.

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4. Find where competitors win and you are absent

Find the topics where a competitor is visible and you are not. Each topic is a question that your buyers ask, and you have no presence in it. This is the most actionable list that you will get.

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5. Find why they win

Open the conversations and read the cited sources. Frequently, one or two sources support a competitor that answer engines recommend in thirty answers. That is a specific item that you can respond to, not a general disadvantage.

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6. Monitor changes, not levels

The direction of the score of a competitor is more important than its absolute value. If you examine the comparison regularly, set it as a Business Scorecard goal.

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What not to do

Do not respond to each move of a competitor. Answers change from run to run, and one change is usually noise. Act only on a continuous direction that has a visible cause in the citations.