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A competitor in FixAEO is any brand an AI model names in an answer to one of your prompts. Most of them find you. FixAEO reads every answer, extracts the brands mentioned, and ranks them against you without you configuring anything. You only step in when you want to force a specific rival into view, or filter your citations by one.

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How competitors get detected

Automatically, from your prompt results. Run a non-branded prompt like “best issue tracker for a small engineering team” and whichever brands the model names get counted. They appear in your industry ranking with their mention count and share. Nothing is populated during setup. Your competitor list is a by-product of your prompts, which is another reason to keep most of them non-branded. See Setting up your prompts.
If a rival never appears, that’s data, not a gap. It means the models aren’t naming them for the questions you track.

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Pinning a competitor

Pinned competitors always appear in your ranking, even with zero mentions. They show as “Watching” until they surface. Pin them from the Tracked competitors card on the Industry page. The add field asks for the company’s domain, like drift.com — a domain is unique and lets FixAEO fetch their logo. A plain brand name works too. Beside it sits a suggestion row built from the top of your current ranking. The suggestions skip your own brand and anything you’ve already pinned.
FixAEO Industry page scrolled to the Tracked competitors card, showing the Gap Analysis above (domains that cite rivals but not you) and the Pinned pills below (Jira, Monday.com, Height, ClickUp, Asana, Notion) next to the Add a competitor domain input
Use the suggestion buttons where you can. They insert the name exactly as it appears in your ranking, so the spelling lines up without you checking it.
Pinning does one more thing: it unlocks the denominator toggle on the Industry page.
  • All brands divides your mentions by every brand the scanner detected.
  • Tracked only divides by you plus your pinned competitors.
The first is the honest baseline. The second answers “how am I doing against the four rivals I actually care about”. The toggle appears once you’ve pinned at least one competitor.

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Competitor domains are a separate list

There’s a second, different list: competitor domains, added from the Competitors card in your brand settings. You enter a domain like stripe.com plus an optional label. They don’t sync. If you want a rival in both places, add them twice.

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How many should you track?

Pin three to five. The trends chart plots your closest rivals against you and rolls the rest into an “Other” line, so a long pin list stops being readable. Pick rivals your buyers actually compare you against, not every brand the models mention. A long pin list makes the ranking noisy and the quadrant unreadable.

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What the competitive views tell you

  • Industry ranking — every brand ranked by share of voice, with mentions and the change since the start of your window. Read Share of voice for how it’s worked out.
  • Competitor drilldown — click any row. A Prompts tab shows which of your prompts they win, and a Sources tab shows which domains got cited when they did.
  • Competitive quadrant — share of voice on one axis, sentiment on the other, so you can see who’s both visible and well described.
The drilldown is the one to spend time in. Ranking tells you that you’re behind. The Prompts tab tells you exactly which questions you’re behind on, and the Sources tab tells you which pages the models trusted instead of yours. Take that into Citations and you have a target list.