Comparing your AI search position vs competitors quarterly

Quarterly competitive audits are the only way to know whether your AI search work is moving you forward or sideways. A single point-in-time audit tells you where you are. The trend across four quarters tells you whether the work is compounding. Without it, you are running a content programme on hope.

The structure of a quarterly competitive audit

1. Define the comparison set

Pick five to ten direct competitors. These should be brands that target the same buyers as you, in the same geographies, at roughly the same scale.

Add three to five aspirational competitors. These are larger, more established or more visible brands that represent the ceiling of what is achievable in your category. They may not be appropriate for like-for-like comparison, but their citation patterns tell you what the model considers a leader to look like.

For a mid-sized independent ship manager, a reasonable comparison set might include four other independents of similar fleet size and two slightly larger independents. Aspirational anchors might include Anglo-Eastern, Bernhard Schulte, V.Group and Wilhelmsen Ship Management.

2. Lock the prompt set

Use the same thirty to fifty prompts every quarter. The fixed set is what makes trend analysis meaningful. If the prompts shift between quarters, you cannot tell whether changes are real or methodological.

The prompt set should mix:

• Category-defining queries
• Buyer-style natural language
• Geography-keyed queries
• Vessel-type or sub-category specific queries
• Brand-name probes for your brand and the comparison set

3. Lock the engines and conditions

Run each prompt through the same set of engines (typically ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini) with the same configuration: browsing on or off, same model class, fresh chat sessions, three runs per prompt with results unioned.

4. Score consistently

For each prompt and engine, record per brand:

• Cited (0/1)
• Position when cited
• Citation context (positive, neutral, qualified)
• URL cited (if any)

Aggregate to a quarterly scorecard with citation rate, mean position and share of voice for each brand in the comparison set.

What the trends tell you

Your absolute citation rate

The headline number. If you cited in 22% of relevant prompts last quarter and 31% this quarter, the work is paying off. If you stayed flat at 26% with random per-engine variance, it is not.

Your share of voice against direct competitors

Even if absolute citation rates are flat across the category, share of voice can shift. If you went from being cited in 30% of prompts where one competitor was cited in 40%, to both being cited in 35%, you have closed the gap even though your absolute number rose only modestly.

Your performance against aspirational competitors

Closing the gap to aspirational brands is slow and uneven. The signal here is whether the gap is closing at all. Tracking it sets realistic expectations for your leadership team and makes the case for sustained investment over single-quarter expectations.

URL-level patterns

Which of your pages get cited and which never do? The pattern points directly at the next quarter’s content work. If your homepage is cited but your service pages are not, the priority is service-page rewrites. If your service pages are cited but your case studies are invisible, the priority is case study restructuring.

How to action the findings

The temptation after a competitive audit is to act on every finding. Resist it. The audit produces dozens of insights and the team can only execute on three to five before the next quarter.

Pick:

• The single biggest gap to close (typically a content or schema issue on a specific page)
• The single biggest authority signal to pursue (typically a specific publication or directory)
• One or two structural improvements (schema rollout, llms.txt update, internal linking refresh)

Defer the rest to subsequent quarters. The discipline of selection matters as much as the discipline of measurement.

A common audit failure mode

Maritime marketing teams that start a competitive audit programme often abandon it after two quarters because the workload is real and the visible movement is small. This is the wrong inference. AI search citations move on a slower clock than classical SEO rankings, and the cumulative effect of four quarters of disciplined work is consistently larger than the sum of any single quarter’s progress.

Commit to four quarters before you judge the programme. The brands that did this in 2024 are now visibly ahead of those that did it for one quarter and stopped. The advantage is structural and hard to reverse.