How do you compare your AI reputation to competitors?
Run the identical prompt set on the same AI engines over the same time window for your brand and each named peer, then compare sentiment, theme distribution, source citations, and prominence. The conditions have to be held constant, or any differences you see may be artifacts of the method rather than real differences in how AI describes the companies.
Comparing your AI reputation to competitors only means something when the comparison is controlled. The trap is casual comparison: glancing at what one engine said about you today against what a different engine said about a rival last month, and treating the gap as a real difference. It usually isn’t. Different prompts produce different answers, engines weight sources differently, and different time windows catch different versions of the picture, so an uncontrolled comparison measures your method as much as it measures the companies.
Where casual comparison goes wrong
- Different prompts: reword the question and the engine surfaces different brands and framings. A rival that looks absent may just not match the phrasing you used for yourself.
- Different engines: each engine weights and cites sources differently, so a brand that leads on one can trail on another for reasons that have nothing to do with its actual reputation.
- Different time windows: AI narratives shift as sources update, so comparing this month’s answer about you against last quarter’s about a peer compares two different moments.
Hold the prompt set, the engine set, and the time window constant across your brand and every named peer, and the differences that remain are real.
What a controlled comparison reveals
Once the conditions are constant, applying the same read to each brand tells you where you actually stand:
- Sentiment: where one brand’s coverage skews more favorably or more critically than another’s.
- Theme distribution: where each brand is winning or losing the framing for the category.
- Source citations: which sources each brand depends on most, and which a competitor relies on that you don’t.
- Prominence: which brands the engines name first when asked a neutral question about the category.
Running it consistently
AIQ runs peer comparisons within its standard configuration, applying the same prompts across the same AI engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode. The control is built into the setup rather than rebuilt by hand each time, which is what keeps the comparison something you can act on.
Last reviewed: 19/05/2026
