What is Five Blocks’ process for competitive analysis?
Quick answer
Five Blocks benchmarks named peers using IMPACT for keyword-level search diagnostics and AIQ for AI narrative comparison, covering themes, sources, sentiment, and gaps, often revealing interventions the competition has already validated.
Competitive analysis is most useful when it is concrete: not ‘the industry is doing X’ but ‘these three specific peers are doing X, and here is what is working for them.’ Five Blocks sets up a named peer set at the start of every engagement, then runs the same diagnostics for the peers as for the client.
How the peer diagnostics work
- Search, IMPACT™
- Tracks the peers’ SERPs for shared and competitor-specific keywords across the same geographies and languages used for the client, producing a direct comparison of search position, share-of-voice, and SERP composition.
- AI narrative, AIQ™
- Runs the same prompts against the same AI engines for each peer, capturing narrative themes, source attribution, sentiment, and prominence, so the client can see exactly what AI engines are saying about competitors versus themselves.
What the peer view reveals
- Which peers are winning the Wikipedia and AIQ narratives, and what they are doing differently.
- Which sources are working for peers that the client has not yet engaged with.
- Which competitive narratives have settled and which are still in motion.
- Which moves peers have made that produced measurable AI or search shifts.
Most of the highest-leverage interventions on a new engagement come from observing peer experiments that have already worked, the competition has effectively run the test first.
Last reviewed: 19/05/2026
