Competitors

SurfacedBy tracks a set of competitors alongside your domain so you can see where AI answers favor you and where they favor someone else. The Competitors page is included on every plan that runs checks; on Free it is locked.

How competitors are found

• During onboarding. On paid plans, SurfacedBy analyzes your site and category and proposes competitors. You confirm, remove, or add to the list on the Competitors step before your first check.
• From your AI answers. After each check, domains that AI answers for your tracked prompts keep citing or naming are considered as competitors. Competitors found on your first check are included straight away. After that, a newly discovered domain enters your rankings, Share of Voice, and alerts only after it has shown up in checks on at least two different days, so one unusual check cannot flood your list. When that happens, and Competitor alerts are on, you get a New Competitor Detected alert. Domains discovered in the last seven days that are waiting for your review also appear in the Today feed on Overview.

Domains that AI answers cite for almost every category are not treated as competitors: search engines, social networks, forums and Q&A sites, encyclopedias, video and code-hosting platforms, large marketplaces, review sites, directories, documentation, website platforms, government and education sites, and sites that act as publishers rather than brands in your market. Apart from search engines, they still appear in Citations & Sources as sources.

Market Position

Market Position is your rank against the competitors you track, by AI Mentions on your most recent Full Check. You are rank 1 when no tracked competitor has more AI Mentions than you; each competitor with more mentions pushes you down one place, and a tie shares the rank. It is an ordinal, not a score: rank 2 of 5 is not the same as rank 2 of 20, so read it alongside the mention counts.

Market Position is recalculated when a Full Check completes and when your competitor list changes. A Daily Check on its own does not change it; the dashboard keeps showing the rank from the latest Full Check so it does not move with every daily review. If you track no competitors, you have no Market Position until you add some.

The Competitors page

The page has three tabs: Compare (the default), Ranking, and Manage.

Compare

A card for each competitor shows how many of your shared prompts you win, tie, or lose against it. Starter and the trial show cards for up to 3 competitors. Pick a competitor to see:

• a 30-day Brand Coverage trend for you and that competitor,
• source overlap: the sources that cite only you, both of you, or only them,
• what they win on: the prompts where they appear and you do not, and the pages AI cites for them,
• on Professional and Agency, an intelligence profile and their mention pattern,
• the topic clusters where they win.

Below that, a head-to-head table lists each shared prompt with the country, your result, their result, the result on each AI platform, the winner, and the change. Starter and the trial show the first 10 prompts.

Ranking

Ranking is the full leaderboard. It shows your market rank, your Share of Voice, and your Share of Voice gap to rank 1, with Plan how to close the gap to add it to a plan. A market position chart plots each brand by coverage and citation position, sized by Share of Voice. A 30-day Brand Coverage trend compares you with the leader and the set average, and the ranking table lists every tracked competitor with its status, share, citation position, prompt coverage, mentions, and movement. On Professional and Agency, a country comparison and a competitor watchlist are also available.

Manage

• Add competitor adds a domain manually, for example a niche competitor the automatic discovery did not find.
• Confirmed lists the competitors you track. Remove moves one to Dismissed.
• Suggested lists discovered domains waiting for you to Accept or Dismiss.
• Dismissed lists removed competitors. Restore brings one back (to Confirmed if you had added or accepted it, otherwise to Suggested), and Delete removes it permanently.

You can also add a domain as a competitor from its source details on the Citations & Sources page. You can track up to 50 competitors per domain on every plan. The limit counts the Confirmed list and applies to every way a competitor joins it: adding one, accepting a suggestion, and restoring a dismissed competitor that you had added or accepted. At the limit, remove a competitor first. Suggested and Dismissed competitors do not count toward it. Adding, accepting, removing, restoring, and deleting competitors needs the Editor role or above.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice is your share of all AI Mentions across you and your tracked competitors. See Share of Voice.

API access

The Data API exposes a domain's confirmed competitors and a single competitor's details. The list is cursor-paginated. Both are read-only: accepting, dismissing, and adding competitors happen in the dashboard. See the Competitors API reference.