> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surgerank.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Competitor Analysis: See Who AI Cites Instead of You

> SurgeRank shows head-to-head share of voice for every tracked prompt — including which competitor pages earn citations so you can close the gap.

Before SurgeRank, AI search was a blind spot: you could see your own citations slowly accumulate, but you had no way of knowing which competitors were winning the answers you were losing — or why. Competitor Analysis turns that blind spot into an actionable intelligence feed. For every prompt you track, you can see exactly how your share of voice stacks up against each competitor, which specific pages they're getting cited for, and where the gap is small enough to close quickly.

## Adding competitors

To add competitors, open the **Competitors** tab and enter each competitor's domain (for example, `competitor.com`). You don't need to manually specify which pages to watch — SurgeRank crawls AI engine responses for your tracked prompts and discovers cited competitor pages automatically. New cited pages are added to your competitor profile as they're detected.

You can add competitors at any time. Historical share-of-voice data for prompts you're already tracking will be backfilled for the period since you started tracking those prompts.

## Share of voice by prompt

For each tracked prompt, SurgeRank calculates a **share of voice (SOV)** percentage for your brand and each competitor. SOV is the proportion of AI engine responses — across all engines and all weekly samples — in which a given brand is cited for that prompt.

| Prompt                         | Your brand | Competitor A | Competitor B | Other |
| ------------------------------ | ---------- | ------------ | ------------ | ----- |
| "best AI SEO tool"             | 28%        | 44%          | 19%          | 9%    |
| "how to rank in AI search"     | 41%        | 31%          | 12%          | 16%   |
| "AI search optimisation guide" | 17%        | 52%          | 22%          | 9%    |

The SOV table updates weekly. Use the trend toggle to switch from the current week's snapshot to a 12-week trend line per competitor.

## Competitor cited pages

Knowing that Competitor A has 44% SOV is useful. Knowing *which pages* are earning those citations — and why — is what lets you act. SurgeRank surfaces the specific URLs from each competitor that AI engines are quoting most frequently.

Click any competitor URL to open a side panel showing:

* The full URL and page title
* Which AI engines cite it and for which prompts
* A snapshot of the page's schema type, heading structure, and estimated word count
* SurgeRank's assessment of why the page is being cited (e.g., "Dense factual claims in H2/H3 structure" or "FAQPage schema present")

Use this information to understand the content patterns AI engines reward, and apply those patterns to your own pages.

## Gap analysis

The **Gap report** (available under Competitors → Gap Analysis) automatically identifies two categories of opportunity:

* **Zero-SOV prompts** — prompts where you have 0% share of voice and a competitor wins entirely. These require new content or a significant content upgrade.
* **Close-gap prompts** — prompts where you're within 10–15 percentage points of the leading competitor. These are the quickest wins: a targeted content improvement or schema addition is often enough to shift citations your way.

The report sorts prompts by gap size within each category so you always know where to focus first.

## Using gap data to inform content

You don't need to manually copy prompt data from the Gap report into your content workflow. The **AI Content Engine** automatically imports your gap analysis. When you create a new article, the engine pre-fills the *target prompt* field with the prompt where your gap is currently largest, and it uses the competitor cited pages for that prompt to inform the brief it generates.

This means your content pipeline stays tightly connected to your competitive position — every new article you publish is aimed directly at a gap where winning a citation will move your share-of-voice numbers.

<Info>
  You can track up to the number of competitors defined by your plan. Start with your top 3 direct competitors to keep the signal clear — too many competitors at once can dilute the gap analysis and make it harder to prioritise.
</Info>