Competitors
Who gets named instead of you. The landscape ranks the rivals appearing in your answers, and each rival opens a head to head built from the answers themselves.
A competitor in Outercite is not a company you consider a rival. It is a name that appeared in an answer to one of your prompts. That is a stricter and more useful definition, because it is evidence rather than opinion.
What you'll learn
- How the landscape ranks rivals, and what share of voice counts
- What a head to head shows you
- Why an empty Competitors lens is not the same as having no competition
Landscape, rival, answers
The landscape lists the rivals named in your answers, ordered by how much of the answer space they hold. Open one and you get the head to head for that rival: where they beat you, where you beat them, and on which surfaces. Descend again and you are reading the answers that named them, in full.
That last step is what makes the lens worth trusting. Every claim about a rival resolves to a sentence an engine actually wrote.
Share of voice
Share of voice is your portion of the total naming across your tracked prompts. If ten answers name a business and three name you, your share is 30 percent of that space, regardless of how many links anyone has.
It moves for two different reasons and they need different responses:
- You lost ground. Your citations fell while theirs held. Read Changes and Proof to find out what shifted.
- The space grew. More businesses are being named, so the same number of citations is now a smaller slice. That is a market signal, not a failure, and the answer is usually more prompts rather than fewer.
An absence is not a zero
Two different empty states, and the lens tells you which one you are in:
- Nothing tracked. You have added no rivals, so no answer can name one. Add one and every answer that names them starts counting.
- Tracked but not named. Your rivals exist, and none was named in a stored answer in this window. That is an absence rather than a zero: they may not come up on the prompts you track, and a prompt they win that you do not track is never counted at all.
The second state is the one worth sitting with. If a rival is winning prompts you do not track, the platform cannot see it. Coverage of the right prompts is what makes competitive data real, which is why discovery keeps proposing them.
How rivals get on the list
- Add them. Name the businesses you sell against.
- They get discovered. The judge records every competitor named in every answer it reads, so businesses you had not thought of turn up because an engine kept recommending them.
The second source is usually more interesting than the first.
Try this in Outercite
Ask the assistant "How do I compare to @" and pick a rival from the mention menu. The head to head opens beside the answer, and the answers naming them are one step below it.
Related
Competitors and share of voice
The concept in detail, and how to act on a shift.
Add a competitor
The step-by-step.
Proof
The sentences behind every claim in this lens.
Last updated on
Prompts
The questions you are measured on. Prompts are grouped into topics, checked on every surface your plan covers, and read as a grid rather than a list.
Changes
The ledger of what you shipped and whether it worked. Every change climbs a ladder of evidence: proposed, attested, observed live, confirmed moved.