Find your competitors in ChatGPT and other AI answers

Plenty of buyers now ask an assistant for a shortlist before they open a search results page. That makes it worth learning how to find your competitors in ChatGPT and the other AI answer engines: the brands they name, and the pages they quote to justify the names. Those rivals often differ from the ones you meet in Google, and from the ones your sales team mentions.

A third kind of competitor

Search rivals are the sites that rank for your keywords. Business rivals are the companies buyers compare you with. AI answer rivals are a separate group: the brands an assistant recommends when asked, and the pages it cites while doing so. A forum thread or a review roundup can sit on this list without selling anything, because the model leans on it as a source.

When one company appears on all three lists, it is probably winning the customers you wanted.

Doing it by hand

Write prompts the way a customer talks, not the way a marketer does:

• "What is the best scheduling tool for a dental practice?"
• "Which bookkeeping apps work for freelancers in Germany?"
• "What are the alternatives to [your brand]?"

Run each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and look at Google's AI Overview for the same query. For every answer, log the brands named and the pages cited.

Then run each prompt again. Answers vary between sessions, so a single run is an anecdote. Patterns only show after several.

Pay attention to the citations. A page that keeps getting quoted tells you what the model trusts in your category. It is also a target: getting your product mentioned on that page is one way into future answers.

Doing it with tools

Manual prompting is fine for ten questions and painful for fifty. seogeoaeo.ai has two paid tools that cover this ground, and they look at different engines, so it helps to know which is which.

AI Answer Visibility is the closer match to "who do the assistants name instead of me". It asks one question per run and does not cover Google AI Overviews. Each run is a sample, because the answers move.

AI Citation Finder answers a related question: which pages the answers are built from. Its provider tracks the questions people ask most, and far fewer on ChatGPT than on Google, so read its counts as a comparison between pages rather than a census.

Neither tool tracks answers over time. If you want a trend, you rerun them.

Pair it with the search list

The AI list is most useful next to the search list. Competitor Finder, also on seogeoaeo.ai, lists the 30 sites that share the most Google keywords with a domain in one country, flags the close competitors (at least 5% overlap) and shows estimated visits and average rank. It costs 38 credits. Compare its top rows with the brands the assistants named. Overlap tells you who is strong everywhere. A name that appears only in AI answers points to a source the models like that Google does not reward as much.

What it costs

All of these run on one credit balance; the cheapest plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits. One AI Answer Visibility run plus one Competitor Finder run is 158 credits. Each tool shows its price before running.

If you only have a few prompts to test, the free route is fine. Write them, run them twice in each assistant, and keep a spreadsheet. The tools pay off once the prompt list grows past what one person can check by hand. The full method behind this piece, with the search and business sides included, is in seogeoaeo.ai's guide to finding competitors online.