Choosing the competitor set
Also known as: comparison set, denominator
The brands you measure yourself against — the denominator that makes share of voice mean anything, and a list the engines will happily correct for you.
Last revised 2026-09-07. Also available as markdown — request this URL with Accept: text/markdown.
In plain English
Share of voice is your naming as a fraction of all naming. Without a competitor list there is no fraction, only a count. And the list you would write from memory is usually not the list the engines actually name.
That gap is the useful part. Running your questions and reading who appears tells you who the machine treats as your alternative — which is frequently a company your sales team has never heard of, and occasionally not a company at all but a marketplace, a directory or a do-it-yourself approach.
How to fix / set it up
- Run your prompt set once and list every brand named, in order of frequency.
- Compare that list with the one your team would have written. Investigate the differences before dismissing them.
- Track ten or so, including any non-vendor alternative that appears often.
- Revisit quarterly, adding new entrants rather than replacing the set.
The technical detail
Build the set empirically first: run the prompt set, count every brand named, and take the top ten by frequency. Then add the two or three you consider strategic rivals even if they rarely appear — their absence is itself informative.
Keep non-vendor answers in the count. "Use a spreadsheet" and "ask your accountant" are competitors in the only sense that matters: they are what the buyer is told to do instead.
Recheck the set quarterly. A newcomer that starts appearing in AI answers is visible to buyers long before it is visible in your win/loss data.
FAQ
What if a competitor appears that we do not consider a competitor?
The buyer hearing the answer does consider them one, at least for the duration of that answer. That is the only vote being counted.
Should I track a much larger rival?
Yes, as context, but do not manage to it. A category leader will out-appear you for reasons no amount of writing changes quickly; the useful comparison is with brands of your own size.