Competitor Benchmark (AI answers)
A competitor benchmark in AI answers is a side-by-side comparison of how often each business in a market gets named for the same buying questions on the same engines, revealing who holds the slots you don't and why.
Also known as: AI competitive analysis, Share of voice benchmark
A competitor benchmark answers the question your own mention rate can't: compared with whom? If ChatGPT names your dental practice in 20% of answers to the buying questions in your city, that's either excellent or poor depending on whether the practice down the street is at 5% or 60%. The benchmark runs the same prompts on the same engines and reports every business named, so you see the whole field, not just your slice of it.
It's built from the same tracking runs that measure you. Each answer names a few businesses; recording all of them rather than just checking for your own name gives you each competitor's mention rate, typical position, and sentiment for free. Over time you can see who's rising, who's flat, and whether a new entrant is starting to appear for questions you used to own.
The most useful part is usually the sources. When a competitor gets named and you don't, the cited sources in that answer tell you why. Maybe they have a pricing page and you don't. Maybe their Yelp profile is complete and yours has four reviews from 2019. Maybe a local Reddit thread recommends them by name. Yext found 86% of AI citations in its 6.8 million citation sample came from brand-managed sources, owned sites and managed listings, which means most of what's earning your competitors their mentions is something you can also build.
For a small business, the benchmark also keeps expectations honest. AI recommendation rates are low across the board. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of multi-location brand locations, versus 11% for Gemini and 7.4% for Perplexity. If you and every competitor are near zero on ChatGPT, that's the state of the engine, not a failure on your part, and the opportunity is in being the first to show up consistently.
Tibly's competitor benchmark tracks every business named in your prompt runs across seven engines, compares mention rate, position, and sentiment side by side, and shows the cited sources behind each competitor's mentions. When the gap is a page you're missing, Tibly drafts it and publishes to your site; when it's a listing, it tells you which one.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Share of Voice (AI)AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked AI answers that name your business instead of a competitor's, measured per engine and across repeated prompts, since a single AI answer isn't a reliable sample.
- Mention Rate (Visibility Rate)Mention rate, also called visibility rate, is the percentage of AI answers to a tracked set of buying questions that name your business, calculated per engine over repeated runs, so it measures how reliably an engine recommends you.
- Source AnalysisSource analysis is the practice of collecting every page and domain AI engines cite when answering a set of buying questions, then ranking them per engine to find which directories, review sites, and websites drive who gets recommended.
- Content Gap (AI answers)In AI visibility, a content gap is a buying question that AI engines answer by naming your competitors but not you, usually because your website has no page stating the specific service, price, location, or detail the engine needed.
Common questions about Competitor Benchmark (AI answers)
- How do I find out which competitors AI recommends instead of me?
- Run the buying questions for your trade and city on each engine repeatedly and record every business named, not just whether you appear. The pattern over a few weeks shows who holds the slots. Tibly does this automatically and includes the cited sources so you can see why each competitor was named.
- Why do competitors with worse reviews get named more than me?
- Usually because the engine could find and verify more about them: a clearer website, complete listings, specific service pages, recent mentions. Reviews are one input among several. Check the cited sources in the answers that name them; the gap is almost always visible there.