Competitors, Sources and Briefs

Competitors answers why does AI pick them? from the competitor’s side. It has two views beside it: Sources, the pages to be on, and Briefs, what each engine says about you. The lenses behind them are described in Why.

The Competitors list

The brands your topics’ answers pick instead of you, by Answer Share. Each row has:

• its share and the change;
• the topics where it leads you, largest gap first;
• how many of the pages engines read name it, and how many of those leave you out;
• in how many of the checked searches it ranks;
• its share in answers without search.

A competitor here is a brand you marked as one, or any other brand with a real share of your topics’ answers. Your own brand, hidden brands, the engines themselves and the platforms answers cite are not on the list.

A competitor’s page

• Side by side: its share and yours on every topic, with the gap.
• Sources: the pages that name it, with the ones that leave you out marked as gaps.
• Searches: its best rank in each checked index for each search the engines ran.
• Memory: its share without search, per engine.
• What engines say about it, from the latest briefs.
• What changed recently: pages that newly name it or dropped it, clear share moves, and graded natural experiments (a page change followed by a measured move in its share). See Vercatus Intelligence.
• Plays to close this gap.

Pin, hide and add

Analysts, admins and owners can change the list. The changes apply to the site, everywhere it shows.

• Pin a brand to keep it on the leaderboard and mark it a competitor.
• Hide a brand that is not a competitor: a platform, a publisher, a namesake. A hidden brand still counts in the answers; it is only left off the lists. Show brings it back.
• Add a competitor by name, and its domain if you know it. A brand Vercatus already saw keeps its counts. The domain is what makes a brand’s pages count as its own, so a cited page on it counts as cited for that brand, and a page on it is never a gap for you.

A competitor’s domains come from your list first, then from public records of the company’s official website, then from the domain its own cited pages are on. A domain nothing supports is dropped. Your own brand cannot be hidden or re-kinded.

Sources

The third-party pages engines read for your topics, across all of them, ranked by how many answers cite them and how many competitors they name, with gaps first. Each row has its topics, the engines that read it, whether it names you, the competitors it names, and when it last changed. Below the pages, the domains: how often each was cited, how many of its pages were read and how many name you.

A gap row links to its Get named on a page engines read play. A page Vercatus could not read shows as unread or blocked, still counted. A page you could not be named on (an app’s store listing, a company’s own product page, documentation, a thread, an encyclopedia, or a “best of” list its own publisher is on) is listed but never marked as a gap, and a page in another language than your market’s is marked.

Forums and communities shows how much of your answers cite forums, Q&A sites and subreddits (Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, a country’s own forums), per engine, and which communities and threads they are, with the language and whether it fits your market. They are counted from the addresses engines cite, so Reddit, which Vercatus does not open, counts. Each community becomes a Take part in a community play.

Briefs

One card per engine: whether it knows you and would recommend you, its view in its own terms, the facts it states, its reasons for and against, what would change its mind (marked where the evidence agrees), what it knows without searching, and what changed since the last brief. Show the probes opens the full answers behind it.

Briefs are asked once a week. Refresh asks again now; a round already running is not started twice. Every card is labelled as what the engine says, because engines’ own explanations often differ from what moves their answers. A fact an engine gets wrong becomes a Correct a fact play.

Alerts

What changes on these screens can reach your channels and webhooks; see Alerts.