How Can I Analyze My Competitors' Visibility in LLMs
In 2025, SEO is no longer just about ranking #1 on Google. With the rise of Large Language Models and AI-driven search (think Google’s Search Generative Experience and Bing Chat), users are getting direct answers from AI. This means your competitors might be showing up in AI answers even when they’re not topping traditional search results. Backlinko experts said: In fact, some marketers have seen AI-driven traffic skyrocket 800% year-over-year as users turn to chatbots and generative search for information. The game has changed: today, brands compete for recognition as entities that AI will mention or cite in its answers.
Staying ahead requires analyzing your competitors’ visibility in LLM outputs – essentially, understanding how often and how prominently rivals appear in AI-generated responses. This comprehensive guide will walk you through exactly that, with best practices, tools, and insights from industry experts.
What Is Competition in LLM SEO?
Competition in LLM SEO refers to how brands vie for presence within the answers generated by AI “answer engines”. Instead of fighting solely for blue links on a SERP, you’re now fighting to have the AI talk about your brand (or content) when it answers user queries. As one SEO CEO put it, “Brands today are no longer just competing for keywords and links. They are competing for recognition as entities in AI-driven search results and LLM responses.” In other words, if an AI mentions or cites your competitor as a source of information – and not you – that competitor has gained a visibility edge in the LLM landscape.
LLMs like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews (in SGE), and others determine which sources to trust based on entity authority. They consider factors like how often a brand is mentioned in trusted sources, the context & sentiment of those mentions, and the brand’s relevance to industry topics. If your competitor’s name keeps popping up in authoritative articles, forums, and databases that AIs train on, the AI is more likely to include them in responses. Meanwhile, brand mentions can influence AI results even when no direct link is present. This means a competitor with strong unlinked brand mentions and positive sentiment online can become the go-to example or reference in AI-generated answers.
Example: Google’s SGE might answer a question with a synthesized paragraph that includes “According to [Competitor X]...” followed by info from their content. If your brand never gets a nod like that, you’re invisible in the LLM space. The competition is essentially for that AI shout-out.
Why does this matter? First, AI answers are increasingly prominent. Users may never click through to see the source – they’ll just trust the answer. So, if your competitor is repeatedly featured, they gain mindshare with consumers before you even have a chance. Second, early movers are building entity authority now, which could snowball. A brand that’s established as an expert in, say, “4K drones” in AI answers will continue to be referenced unless others overtake their authority. No wonder SEO experts are coining terms like “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” – focusing on tactics to boost brand visibility in AI-generated results.
Key takeaway: Competition in LLM SEO is about owning the narrative in AI-driven answers. It means ensuring that when an AI is answering questions in your niche, your brand is front and center (or at least not absent). To achieve this, you need to monitor how often and where competitors show up in those AI answers, and then adjust your strategy to outperform them as a trusted source.
How Can I Analyze My Competitors' Visibility in LLMs
The Best Practices for LLM Visibility Analysis
Analyzing and improving your competitor visibility in LLMs requires a blend of traditional SEO intelligence and new entity-based strategies. Here are some best practices to guide you:
- Monitor AI Mentions and Citations: Regularly check how often your brand and your competitors are mentioned in AI outputs. Many modern SEO tools let you track AI search appearances (we’ll cover those next). Keep an eye on share-of-voice metrics – i.e. what percentage of AI answers in your domain mention you versus competitors. This will reveal who currently dominates the conversation.
- Perform Manual Prompt Testing: Don’t shy away from being hands-on. Plug relevant industry questions into ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overview, Bing Chat, Perplexity, and others. Note whose content or name appears. Are competitors frequently cited or recommended by the AI? This manual check can surface quick insights on your rivals’ presence and what content the AI finds valuable.
- Leverage Entity SEO & Digital PR: Traditional SEO ranking factors are evolving. To boost your entity authority, get your brand mentioned in high-authority places – even without links. One recommended tactic is to “pitch stories to journalists and sites mentioning your competitors but not you.” This can earn you comparable mentions. Also focus on unlinked mentions on authoritative sites (forums, news, academic references) to strengthen your brand in the AI’s eyes.
- Analyze Content Gaps and Topics: Identify topics where competitors have strong content that AIs love. Using competitor analysis, find content clusters or FAQs your rivals cover that you don’t. If, for example, an AI often cites your competitor’s tutorial on “how to calibrate drones at high altitude,” that’s a signal to create your own high-quality content on that topic. As one case study showed, a brand that built a better structured content hub in response to competitor analysis earned more prominence in AI answers and featured snippets.
- Focus on Sentiment and Reputation: LLMs don’t just count mentions – they understand context. Negative or low-authority mentions won’t help you. Monitor the sentiment around mentions of you and competitors. If a rival is praised consistently while your brand has mixed sentiment, the AI might favor them. Best practice is to respond to negative mentions and bolster positive discussions. A strong, positive digital footprint makes it more likely the AI will “speak well” of your brand.
- Stay Technical: Optimize for AI Crawlers: Ensure your site’s content is easily accessible to AI crawlers (some tools like Profound even let you monitor AI bot crawl activity). Use schema markup, clean HTML, and robust FAQs so that LLMs can digest your content accurately. Technical SEO is still relevant – AI can’t reference what it can’t find or understand! If Google’s AI Mode breaks your content into sub-queries, each piece of your answer should be well-optimized and authoritative.
Following these practices helps you build an LLM visibility strategy: you identify where competitors have an edge, then systematically close those gaps by improving your brand’s presence and content for AI consumption. Remember, as much as AI search is evolving, core SEO fundamentals still apply. (SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra reminds us that abandoning SEO due to LLM hype is a mistake – “Both [SEO and LLMs] have the same fundamentals to ‘ranking’,” he says, meaning quality content and authority still win the day.)
The Best Tools for Competitor LLM Visibility Analysis
Fortunately, you don’t have to manually scour AI chats all day. New and updated SEO tools can track how you and your competitors appear in AI-driven results. Here are the top tools of 2025 to help analyze competitor visibility in LLMs:
- Semrush AIO – The enterprise all-rounder. Semrush has extended its powerhouse SEO platform into AI search tracking. Semrush AIO can monitor your brand across multiple LLMs at scale. Its standout feature is Competitor Rankings and Share-of-Voice dashboards: you get a detailed view of which domains (yours vs. competitors) dominate answers on each AI platform. Semrush leverages its huge infrastructure (from a decade of search data) to scrape ChatGPT, Google’s AI snapshots, Bing, Perplexity, etc. and show where each competitor stands. For example, you can identify that Competitor X gets cited 20% of the time for [Your Topic] across all LLMs, whereas you’re at 10%, and then drill down into which source content of theirs is being referenced. Semrush also provides sentiment analysis and real-time updates, so you’ll know if a competitor suddenly gains traction from a viral mention. (Note: Semrush AIO is robust but comes at a premium price point, catering especially to enterprise needs.)
- SE Ranking (AI Search Toolkit) – The up-and-comer. SE Ranking has introduced an AI Visibility Tracker as part of its SEO suite, aimed at what some call “Generative Engine Optimization.” It lets you track your presence and mentions across top answer engines like Google’s AI Overviews, “AI Mode”, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the upcoming Gemini. Crucially, it’s built with competitor analysis in mind: “Discover how you and your competitors appear in leading LLMs and turn those insights into a strategy,” the tool promises. SE Ranking’s tracker will show which queries trigger AI results where your competitors are mentioned but you aren’t. It also breaks down which parts of an AI answer contain your content or your rival’s, and whether there were links. One useful feature is the ability to monitor rivals in AI search – essentially, you can input a competitor’s domain and see where AI is mentioning them, why, and compare side-by-side with your domain. This toolset provides historical data too, so you can track if a competitor’s visibility is trending up or down over time in AI results. SE Ranking aims to be very user-friendly, making it great for teams who want actionable data without a steep learning curve.
- Profound – The AI-native specialist. Profound is a newer platform (launched in 2024) built exclusively for tracking brand visibility in AI and LLM outputs. It’s gained buzz for its laser focus and innovation speed. Profound offers prompt-level tracking – you can see exactly how different prompt phrasings might surface your competitor versus you. It provides platform-by-platform visibility (so you might find your competitor dominates on, say, Perplexity but not on Claude, for example). A highlight is its in-depth citation analysis: Profound shows which URLs and domains are being cited by LLMs when mentioning you or competitors. This can uncover, for instance, that a competitor’s blog post is frequently fueling ChatGPT’s answers – intel you can use to target that content with better info on your own site. Profound also tracks Share of Voice by topic/region, and even offers real-time logs of LLM “crawls” hitting your site. Being new, Profound is iterating quickly (they secured a major funding round to expand features), but note that it may not have the same breadth of data as established tools. Still, for cutting-edge insights – such as discovering emerging competitors in AI search that aren’t even on your SEO radar yet – Profound is extremely powerful.
These tools (and others like them) are essential for quantifying AI visibility. They save you from guesswork by providing metrics like AI Visibility Score, LLM Citation Share, and Competitive Presence% for your niche. Using them, you can concretely answer questions like: Is my competitor getting more AI love this quarter? What content of theirs is being referenced that mine isn’t? Where do I rank, as an entity, in the AI landscape? Armed with those answers, you can refine your strategy to close the gap.
Final Word
AI-driven search is rapidly moving from novelty to normalcy. Today it might contribute a modest slice of traffic (for many sites, under 1% of traffic comes from AI answers so far), but that slice is growing. To avoid being blindsided, start treating LLM visibility as part of your SEO KPIs. Analyze how your competitors perform within large language model outputs and take action on those insights. This means tracking competitor mentions and citations, creating content that AI wants to quote, and continuously polishing your brand’s digital footprint.
In sum, competitor visibility in LLMs is the new battleground for SEO professionals. Those who adapt fast – by using the right tools and strategies to understand the AI landscape – are the ones who will win the next phase of search. So, get started: audit your presence in AI answers, learn from what your competitors are doing there, and then outshine them with a smarter, more authoritative content strategy. The companies that master this now will be the household names that AI confidently cites in the years to come. Your move!