This Tool Shows You How To Spy on Your Competitors in AI Search

I've asked Perplexity, what's the best investment platform in 2026? And I asked AI mode, who has the best hyaluronic acid? Then I asked Chat GBT, who's the best ground source heat pump installer in London. Believe Renewables, you say. So, what do all these searches have in common? Well, there are winners and there are losers. The winners are the ones that are being consistently recommended. The losers are the ones that aren't even being featured in the conversation. Now, you might have noticed that these AI tools are recommending your competitors over you. And you might be wondering, how do they do that? What's going on? Well, that's exactly what we're going to cover in today's video. I'm going to show you behind the scenes using a very special tool that actually allows you to deconstruct what's going on so that you can copy what your competitors are doing intentionally or not, that's leading to them getting featured in AI answers. That means you can then replicate parts of their strategy and implement them yourself. The goal, of course, is to use those strategies to not only beat, but dominate, crush your competitors. And I'm going to show you an example of a business that we've helped do exactly that. Sounds pretty fun, right? Okay. So, to go through this process, the first thing you need to do is identify one of your competitors. My advice is to pick someone who really gets stuck in your teeth. That competitor is consistently being recommended across different AI platforms. Now, I'm going to show you how to do some very quick analysis just to see how they're doing. The tool that we're going to be using is Seamrush's AI visibility toolkit. They also happen to be sponsoring this video, but to be honest, I'll be using them anyway. And because they're sponsoring, we've actually negotiated a free trial for you, which I'll tell you about later on. So, the example that we're going to be using today of a really good competitor is HubSpot. Now, HubSpot, if you don't know it, is a software company. They sell CRM. The reason we're using HubSpot is there a business that's doing really well in AI search. It's a really useful example cuz it's fairly unlikely that your competitor is going to be doing as well as HubSpot, but let's just use them because they're a really good example. So, the first thing we're going to do is go into the AI visibility toolkit and in visibility overview, you're just going to stick in your competitor's website here. So, straight away, we're going to get some information that tells us broadly how well they're doing. So, let me just talk you through what we're looking at here. First thing we've got over on this left hand side is an AI visibility score. This visibility score is per country. So, at the moment I'm looking with a UK filter on, but you can see that they've got a visibility score for each of the main countries that they're visible in. HUSWAT has a UK visibility score of 81 out of 100, which is really good. Hopefully, you don't find a competitor with visibility this good, but if you do, that's okay. We're going to see how to beat them anyway. The next section that we're interested in is this section over here. And there are really three metrics that are key to unlocking what's going on. The first is mentions. And now, a mention is when an AI tool mentions your brand, like here. So the higher your mentions, the more often you're being recommended or talked about. And you can see this score over time. So in HubSpot's case, we can see they had a bit of a dip. In October, they've gone right up since then, and they've pretty much maintained that. Also worth saying that this is across all of the AI platforms here, but you can filter these if there are particular platforms that you're more interested in than others. The next metric is citations. This is the number of times that an AI tool has used one of HubSpot's web pages as a reference in its answer. For example, in this prompt in AI mode on Google, we can see that Google has cited the independence website. So, this will be one citation. The third metric is cited pages. So, this is the number of pages on their website that have been cited. In HubSpot's case, they have 3,200 pages on their website which have been featured in AI answers. Now, of course, Semrush doesn't index every single prompt that everybody makes in the entire world. It's working from a fixed set of prompts, but that's okay because that fixed set is absolutely massive and the numbers that you'll see here are obviously relative to different businesses. So, whilst HubSpot has been mentioned way more than 10 a half thousand times each month, if you put your business in and you see that you're at 5,000 mentions per month, for example, on average, you know, your business is being mentioned half as many times as HubSpot. So, this is a great way to get an overall picture and you can stick different competitors in here and see how they're doing relative to each other. If you want to go a layer deeper, that's when we go to the competitor research section. So, with the competitor research section, you can basically put your brand up on a board against your competitors and see how you're each doing. Now, in this example, we're going to pretend that we're the marketing team for Active Campaign, which is a competitor to HubSpot. So, this is our brand and then we've got our competitors here. So, Zoho, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce. We want to put all of us on the board and see how we're doing against each other. Now, a quick tip here. When you open this competitor research tab, Seamrush is going to suggest some competitors. They might not be the right ones for you. So, you want to make sure that you're choosing actual business competitors, not just other websites that are seen in a lot of the same AI answers as yours because they might not be real brand competitors. Okay, so we've now got this table which shows how we're performing against each other. Now, the bad news for Active Campaign is that we're significantly less visible than all of our competitors. We can also select the audience metric which shows how many people we're getting in front of and the mentions metric which shows how many times we are being mentioned against our competitors. Active campaign is losing on all three of these. So in this demo example we have a little bit of work to do. Okay. So the next step is to start reverse engineering exactly why this is the case. Why are our competitors pulling ahead of us and getting so much more visibility? Well, luckily the tool that we're using today, which also happens to be today's sponsor, is Semrush One, and it allows us to see all of this information about what our competitors are doing. Semrush One gives you access to the SEO toolkit, which allows you to research target keywords, audit websites, track rankings, and analyze your competitors. You also get access to the AI visibility toolkit which allows you to discover how your brand appears in Google AI overviews, AI mode, chat, GBT, Gemini, and Publexity. Now, the good news is you can get a free trial. If you go to the Seamrush website, you can get a free trial for 7 days. Or if you want more than that, you can go to exposurinja.com/seamrush one and watch 14 days. So, head over to exposurinja.com/smrush1 to get a 14-day free trial. Plug in your competitors, do all your research. If you love the tool, great. If not, you can cancel. Okay. So, so far we've learned that our brand Active campaign isn't doing as well as most of our competitors. So, how do we reverse engineer what they're doing, which is going so well, so that we can build a plan to eventually crush them into the dust? Well, really, if we want our brand to be mentioned a lot, we need to find out what our competitors are being mentioned for that we're not being mentioned for. So, let's see exactly how to do that. So, if you scroll down the page on competitor research, you'll see this topics and prompts section. So, the prompts are things that people ask AI tools. For example, so who has the best hyaluronic acid is a prompt. Hyaluronic acid would be the topic. So, this section allows you to see the topics that your competitors are consistently showing up for and the individual prompts if you want and the ones that you're showing up for and the gap. And it's the gap that really needs filling. So, we've got a few different things here. I'm just going to run through them because they might not be super intuitive if you're new to this. Missing topics and prompts are the ones where your competitors are being mentioned and recommended, but you're not. So, this is the gap. Weak are the ones where your competitors are being mentioned more than your brand. Shared topics and prompts are the ones where you and your competitors are both being mentioned. Strong topics and prompts are the ones where you're being mentioned more than your competitors. And unique topics and prompts are the ones where you're being mentioned, your competitors are not. So, generally speaking, the higher the number in strong and unique, the better you're doing. If you're seeing a lot in missing and weak sad times. Now, there's one really important caveat here, and that is that not all prompts and topics are created equally. Let's take a look. So, WhatsApp link and fake chat methods is one topic where Active Campaign is showing up for, but others aren't. The problem is that's not a great topic for us. That's not going to lead to customers. So, what you'll often find is that it actually helps to filter your prompts by a certain topic that you know is really strategically important for your business. So, Active Campaign sells a CRM. We're going up against HubSpot, the giant of CRM. So, let's filter our topics and prompts for the word CRM. That will allow us to focus only on the stuff that is really strategically relevant in this category. Sad times for Active Campaign. There are no unique or strong topics where Active Campaign is being mentioned and HubSpot is not. They are almost all in the missing section meaning we are not being spoken about in the CRM topics enough even within a particular topic like CRM which is relevant to active campaign there are going to be prompts and subtopics that are maybe less relevant so for example Sage CRM solutions you might think well Sage CRM solutions that's not really a topic where we would expect Active Campaign to show up in well actually we could potentially target it and some of our competitors are being featured in these prompts. Maybe somebody's looking for Sage CRM alternatives or Sage CRM integrations. Those might be topics that we want to prioritize. Then there are going to be topics like CRM benefits and advantages where you absolutely want to be featured. And we can see here that Zoho, HubSpot, and Salesforce are all being featured here. There's 1,600 searches for this per month. This is absolutely a conversation that Active Campaign would want to be in, but they're just not. If we want to drill down inside this topic and look at the individual prompts that are feeding it, we can do. We just click the little expanding icon. What should small businesses consider when choosing a CRM system? And we can see there are seven brands being mentioned, but only one of the five competitors is showing up here, and that is zoho.com. Okay, so what do we do with this? Well, the first thing that we could do is we could actually create some content on our website about this topic if we think it's strategically important. What should small businesses consider when choosing a CRM system? You could put together a really detailed guide on the small businesses guide to choosing a CRM. You could pack this with really useful information, some firsthand advice from your team, some examples of small businesses that have chosen your thing as their CRM solution. And if you target this well enough, you've got a decent chance of that content being pulled through into this AI answer. And if this AI answer is talking about your CRM platform, for example, you have then an increased chance of showing up in the response and being recommended. And by the way, if you need help with AI search visibility like this and you want someone to just tell you exactly what to do or even just do it for you, that's exactly what the team here at Exposing Ninja does. All you need to do is head over to exposureninja.comreview. On that page, you'll see a questionnaire to apply for a live free review. In this live free review, one of our team will actually join you on a call to run through your business's current visibility and identify the opportunities for growth. Now, yes, we'll look at AI search, but we'll also look at how your website is performing and whether there are any improvements that you can make to generate more leads and sales from your existing traffic. This is some of the lowest hanging fruit because these people are already hitting your website. They might just be bouncing when instead you could be converting them into good quality leads and sales. This service is free, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for this over at exposurinja.com/re. The other way, of course, to get featured in these answers that you're not currently showing up for is to be seen on the websites that are being cited. So that's where we head over to sources. So sources are the websites that these AI tools are pulling from in order to compile their answers. And this allows you to see where your competitors are being mentioned on other people's sites that you're not. So again, we've got the same filters here. We've got the missing sources. So these are the ones where your competitors are being referenced, but you're not. You've got the weak sources. These are the ones mentioned more than you are. You've got shared which is where you and your competitors are being mentioned in these sources. The strong ones where you are mentioned more than your competitors and the unique ones these are the ones where you are mentioned and your competitors aren't. So again we see a similar pattern here where the missing and the weak sources are unfortunately in active campaigns case well in excess of the ones that are strong and unique. Just as before not all of these sources are going to be relevant. Some of them are even going to be your competitor's own websites being cited as a source. And it's fairly unlikely that your competitors are going to be mentioning and recommending you. So, you're going to have to look through this list to find the sources that are going to be most relevant for your business. The aim of the game is to work out which pages you really need your business featured on to be spoken about in these AI answers. So, let's just take a look. Now, down here, we have Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great website to be mentioned on. And the fact that it is userenerated content, albeit with fairly strict policing on what edits you can make, means that it is possible to get your brand featured in Wikipedia. And because Wikipedia is a trusted source, you can get quite a lot of mentions here. We can see from this example that Active Campaign only has 18 mentions for the relevant prompts, whereas competitors are significantly higher. Salesforce almost a,000 mentions on Wikipedia. So, it's likely that Salesforce has at some point made it a priority to get their brand referenced on Wikipedia as much as possible. And this is them pulling through into AI responses. Now, if we want to, we can expand this to see the particular prompts that are referencing our competitors. And some of these will be completely generic. Here's a prompt for brands and names. And we can see that Google has pulled from Wikipedia. It's just given a really sort of generic answer to, oh yeah, here are some names of brands and Salesforce is mentioned, none of our competitors are. And this is an example where you could get featured. The value of getting featured for a prompt like brands and names is obviously absolutely negligible to none. So it probably isn't a top priority, but there will be other prompts which might be much more relevant. For example, what tools do growth hackers typically use to boost user acquisition? Well, this could be a really relevant prompt for Active Campaign. It's pulling some of its answer from Wikipedia. We can see that HubSpot and Mailchimp are mentioned. So, if we're marketing Active Campaign, could we find that Wikipedia page and see if we could get mentioned? So, all we would do to do that would be to click over here. This is the sources page. This shows us all of the sources in this article. We go down to find the Wikipedia one. We open that tab. Is this the sort of page that we want to get our brand mentioned on? Yes, absolutely. These are all really good things. We could produce some content on our website about growth hacking, for example, and get it listed here and maybe we find some data about growth hacking or we do some interviews with some growth hackers that use our platform if we thought that growth hacking was a topic that we wanted to really improve our visibility for. So, these sources really become the foundation of a digital PR plan. When our team at Exposure Ninja is increasing our clients visibility in AI search, this is some of the sort of thing that we do. We identify the pages that are already feeding AI answers and then we figure out how to get our clients brands mentioned and recommended on those pages knowing that if we do that, we can increase the chance that their brand is going to be recommended in that AI answer. So, this is going to take a bit of time, hence why that 14-day free trial of Seamrush 1 is going to be particularly useful. Remember, you can get that 14-day free trial either the link in the description or at exposurinja.com/seamrush1. Okay, so at this point, you've identified where your competitors are winning, where their strengths are, the topics and prompts that they're consistently being featured that you're not. You've also identified the web pages that AI tools are citing which mention your competitors that don't mention you. And hopefully you're starting to build up a bit of mental priority into what matters. You're going to be targeting the services, the features, the audiences that are most relevant to you. So now you need to turn all of this observation into a clear plan that you, your team or your marketing agency can follow to get your visibility up. So let me show you a client example where we've done this and I can explain the prioritization framework that we used in order to improve their visibility. Cuz right now you might be feeling completely overwhelmed. There's loads of stuff that we need to do. We know that our visibility sucks. What do we do first? Well, for this client, Value Capital Funding, we helped improve their visibility in AI search and traditional search at the same time. Now, they help businesses that are struggling with debt, but they didn't really have much visibility in traditional search or AI search, and people didn't really know that they existed. This is actually the perfect scenario for AI search because if people don't know that you exist, but actually you've got the solution to a really valuable problem, you can get AI tools recommending your brand as a solution that customers may never have known about previously. And that's exactly what we did. This business have been really reliant on paid ads, but the trouble is if people don't really know that you exist or don't really know what you do, they might not be searching for that. So those ad clicks can be very expensive and pretty low quality. So the first thing that we did was work on their positioning, making sure it was really clear what they did for whom and making sure that that message was ultra clear on their website. When we rebuilt their website, we focused on conversions. So when somebody landed on their web page, we wanted to make sure that the chance of that person turning into a lead was as high as possible. So we built the entire website around a really clear message and a very clear conversion path. We then had to work out which topics and prompts we wanted to target. So for this business, they didn't just want to share loads of information. They really wanted to get in front of people that were about to make a purchase. We call that bottom of the funnel topics and prompts. We wanted people that really needed a solution now where value capital funding would be the perfect solution. Those were the people that we really wanted to show up for because we'd worked on the positioning and the clear message on the website. That meant that when they were showing up for these terms, there was a really compelling message that makes people click and go through to their website. The third step was building authority and also improving their lead quality. So, we built authority by building out a lot more content on their website, targeting these bottom of the funnel, high intent topics and prompts. We wanted to be feeding the AI tools the exact information that they needed to recommend value capital funding. Now, this takes time, but it's a really valuable exercise. The other thing that we did is targeted link building and digital PR. This got value capital funding featured on the sort of websites that were being pulled through into AI responses. And by improving their overall link profile and authority, this meant they're showing up higher in every other web search. So that when these AI tools are doing their background web searches, they're seeing value capital funding more and more often. The result is that their rankings and their leads have improved significantly. They've been generating around 50 conversions per month, which is obviously super low. We've managed to get this to almost 400 per month. We're also getting them more than 10 times the number of conversions directly from AI search tools like chat GBT. So, this is people who are clicking on links from chat GBT converting on their website. This doesn't include the people that are seeing their name mentioned in chat GPT, then heading over to Google, typing their name, and then clicking on their website. So, here's what that looks like. The number of keywords ranking in the top three positions on Google has gone up significantly. The number of times they're being featured in AI overviews has gone up significantly. And this has led to about a 4x increase in organic traffic and a 50% increase in branded traffic. This is more people knowing about value capital funding because they're seeing the brand in these answers. Plus, prospects in their sales calls are saying that they've seen value capital funding in AI answers about debt relief. So, we know for a fact that this is driving real business for this company. Now, value capital funding obviously has a long way to go yet until they're the size or they have the visibility of HubSpot. The great thing is you don't have to be a huge brand to increase your visibility in AI search because everything is out in the open. With a tool like Seamrush 1, you can reverse engineer any competitor's visibility and find out exactly why they are being recommended and what topics and prompts they're being recommended for. From there, it's just about building a prioritized action plan that you or your team can follow to improve your visibility and start dominating in AI search. And don't forget, if you need help with this, if you just want somebody to either do it for you or tell you exactly what to do, we've worked with hundreds of clients in every imaginable market. And we've got some really good playbooks to implement these sorts of improvements to any business. So, reach out to the team at Exposure Ninja. We're happy to do this free review for you where we analyze your business, your current visibility across AI, search, and other platforms as well. We'll take a look at your website and see how it's converting and then we'll map you out a road map that you can follow or you can follow with us or you can follow with your external agency or a team inside the business to improve your visibility and generate more leads and sales online. This service is free, but not everybody is eligible for it. So, you do need to apply over at And thanks to our sponsor, Semrush. Don't forget you can get your 14-day free trial over at exposurinja.com/semrush1.