How does Five Blocks benchmark my brand’s reputation against peers?
Five Blocks benchmarks reputation against a named peer set using two instruments: IMPACT™ compares search position, share-of-voice, and SERP composition across shared keywords; AIQ™ compares AI narrative themes, source attribution, and sentiment across the eight engines AIQ currently tracks. Results appear in every monthly report, giving clients a relative position rather than an absolute number.
Peer benchmarking answers the question every client actually asks: how do we look compared to the firms we are competing against? Five Blocks defines a named peer set at the start of each engagement, typically five to ten named competitors, financial peers, or talent-market competitors depending on the program goal, and runs the same diagnostics for the peers as for the client throughout the engagement.
How IMPACT™ benchmarks search
- Same keyword sets, same geographies
- IMPACT™ runs the client’s priority keyword set against each named peer across the same geographies and languages, producing side-by-side comparisons rather than isolated snapshots.
- What gets compared
- Search position for shared queries, share-of-voice across the keyword set, and SERP composition, which owned, earned, third-party, and hostile URLs are appearing for each brand.
- How leverage is identified
- The comparison reveals which peers are winning specific SERP positions the client is not, and which moves peers have made that produced measurable search shifts.
How AIQ™ benchmarks AI narratives
- Same prompts, same engines
- AIQ™ runs the same prompt set against the eight AI engines AIQ currently tracks: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, for the client and for each named peer.
- What gets compared
- AI narrative themes, the sources each engine cites, sentiment, and prominence across engines. This shows which peers are winning the AI narrative and what sources are driving that outcome.
- Why this matters
- AI engines often describe peers differently even for closely related queries. Seeing those gaps identifies which source relationships and narrative themes the client should prioritize.
How benchmarks are reported
- The combined peer view appears in every monthly report alongside absolute client metrics.
- Relative positioning tends to mobilize internal action more efficiently than absolute numbers, because the board, allocators, or recruiting committee cares about the competitive position, not the raw score.
- Benchmarks also surface peer experiments that have already worked, source moves, content investments, Wikipedia changes, giving the client a roadmap of validated interventions rather than untested hypotheses.
Last reviewed: 19/05/2026
