Competitor Benchmarking
A Visibility Score of 45% means little until you know what the brands you compete with score on the same prompts. Competitor benchmarking in Spotlit puts your numbers beside theirs, and shows which brands take the answers you miss.
What Is Benchmarked
Every captured answer is read for mentions of your brand and of each competitor you track (see Competitors). From those mentions, Spotlit works out the same numbers for every brand in the set, so each one can be ranked:
- Visibility Score: how often the brand appears in answers to unbranded prompts
- Share of Voice: the brand's share of all the brand mentions in those answers
- Average Position: where the brand is named, in the answers that name it
- Citation Share: how often the brand is cited in answers
How each number is counted is on Visibility Tracking.
Where to See the Comparison
| Where | What it compares |
|---|---|
| Home | The "Rank vs competitors" tile shows your place among the brands you track, as # and a number |
| Answer Engine Insights › Visibility | Visibility Score Rank, Share of Voice Rank and Average Position Rank: a table of the brands, your own among them, with each one's value. Expand opens the full list. Topic Rankings gives the numbers for each topic. |
| Answer Engine Insights › Platforms | Visibility Score by Platform and Share of Voice by Platform: the same comparison, one AI assistant at a time |
| Answer Engine Insights › Citations | Citation Rank, and the share of citations that go to You and to Competitor sites |
| Exclusion Analysis | The "Who won" card counts the competitors recommended in the answers that left you out |
Tracked Brands and Everyone Else
The rank tables list your brand and the competitors you track. Share of Voice also counts brands you do not track: if the answers name them, their mentions are in the total, so a tracked brand's share can be smaller than the table alone suggests. If a brand keeps showing up in answers and is missing from your rank tables, add it as a competitor.
Reading the Comparison
- Behind on Visibility Score: a competitor is named in more of the answers than you are. Open Exclusion Analysis to see which answers left you out, and which pages the assistants read.
- Ahead on Visibility Score, behind on Share of Voice: you appear often, but the answers that name you name other brands more. See Visibility Score vs Share of Voice.
- Strong on one assistant, weak on another: check the Platforms tab before you decide anything. A gap on one assistant is a different problem from a gap on all of them.
- Strong on one topic, weak on another: use Topic Rankings to see where each competitor is ahead, then look at the prompts under that topic.
Keep in mind that one answer is not a result. In a January 2026 study by SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai (not peer-reviewed; a co-author's company sells AI tracking software), the same question put to the same assistant many times almost never gave the same list of brands twice. Our reading: a rank that moves by one place from week to week is probably noise. Look for gaps that hold across many answers.
Finding the Openings
These are suggestions for what to do with the comparison:
- Pick the topic with the widest gap. Start where a competitor is clearly ahead and the prompts are ones your buyers ask.
- Read the pages behind the winner. Who won and What they read, on Exclusion Analysis, show the brands and the sources in the answers you lost.
- Look at the citations. On the Citations tab, see which kinds of site the assistants cite, and how much of that goes to your competitors' own sites.
- Check your own set. A competitor that looks strong on prompts you wrote narrowly may look different on a broader set. See Topics & Prompts.
Related
- Competitors: add, edit and name the brands you track
- Exclusion Analysis: why answers leave you out and who won
- Citation Intelligence: which sources the assistants cite
- Metrics Glossary: every metric in plain English