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Surfient module · Intelligence

Benchmark Share of AI Voice against the stores you actually compete with

Pick up to ten named competitors. Surfient tracks their AI citations, schema coverage, content patterns, and weekly deltas — so you know exactly what to copy, what to one-up, and what to leave alone.

  • Side-by-side scoreboards for your store vs. up to 10 named competitors — Share of AI Voice, citability scores, schema coverage, freshness cadence.
  • Content-pattern analysis surfaces why a competitor wins a specific prompt: their lead sentence, their spec density, their FAQ graph, their policy excerpts.
  • Weekly delta digest tells you who moved — who launched a new product, who shipped a GEO fix, who quietly overtook you on a high-intent category prompt.
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Competitor Intelligence

Share of voice across 5 engines

#1 in 3 / 5
Your brandCompetitor ACompetitor B

The problem

Your competitors are shipping fixes quietly — and you're the last to know

GEO is moving fast enough that a competitor can pull ahead in a category in under a month just by shipping clean product schema and a citation-ready lead. Most teams find out when their share of organic search drops. By then the gap has a ten-week head start.

  • 6 weeks

    average window a GEO-shipping competitor has before anyone else notices

    Based on merchant onboardings where we audited the competitive set at kickoff — the gap was typically already six to ten weeks old.

  • 11

    new AI-native Shopify competitors per month launch in the average DTC category

    They don't show up in your Google-rank tracker. They show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers because their entire content stack was designed for it.

  • 1

    thing you can do about it — instrument your competitive set and track the deltas weekly

    Which is exactly what Competitor Intelligence is built for.

How it works

Nominate, parse, score, compare

Comparable data, weekly. Strong opinions about what "comparable" means so you don't get tricked by aggregate metrics that paper over real differences.

  1. Nominate your competitive set

    Add up to 10 competitors by domain. We crawl their catalog, parse their schema, cache their policy pages, and build a full Surfient-equivalent profile of their AI-indexing surface. The profile refreshes weekly and archives every version.

  2. Run the shared prompt panel

    Your competitive set runs against the same prompt panel the Visibility Monitor runs against your store. That means every citation is measured apples-to-apples — if you and three competitors all show up for the same prompt, you see who's the quoted one vs. the also-mentioned.

  3. Decompose why they win

    When a competitor wins a prompt, Competitor Intelligence breaks down why. It compares their lead sentence to yours, their schema coverage to yours, their policy freshness to yours, and their Brand Fact density to yours. You see the why — not just the what.

  4. Ship the counter-moves

    Every competitive finding has a "counter-move" suggestion. Sometimes it's a GEO Audit finding flagged high severity, sometimes it's a content rewrite, sometimes it's a net-new policy page. The counter-moves feed back into your Fix Pack queue so the response is in-workflow, not an email thread.

Inside the app

What you’ll see after install

Every number a Shopify merchant running Surfient Competitor Intelligence tracks in one glance — live from the Surfient admin. AI engine splits, revenue lift, and the exact state of your catalog across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.

Capabilities

What the intelligence module shows you

Seven views, each designed around a decision a merchandising or brand lead actually makes week to week.

  • Head-to-head scoreboard

    Your store vs. each competitor on five axes: Share of AI Voice, average citability score, schema coverage percentage, freshness cadence (days since last refresh on cited pages), and hallucination rate against their own Brand Facts. Updated weekly, with historical trend lines.

  • Per-prompt matchup view

    For any prompt in your panel, see the full answer from each engine with named brands highlighted. Quickly tell when a competitor is winning because of a specific claim vs. when they're winning because you're missing schema vs. when the model simply doesn't know you.

  • Content-pattern extractor

    For each competitor's top-cited pages, we extract their lead sentence length, subject-verb patterns, spec-density metrics, FAQ graph size, and policy-excerpt style. Good copywriters read these and know what to internalise vs. what to differentiate against.

  • Schema coverage diff

    A side-by-side comparison of every JSON-LD type you and your competitors emit. When a competitor ships new schema — Review, FAQPage, HowTo, QAPage — the diff fires within a week and you see the recommendation impact within three.

  • Freshness cadence tracker

    Shows how often each competitor updates their top product pages. Stores that update product specs monthly get cited more than stores that update quarterly. The tracker tells you where your cadence is a liability.

  • New-SKU-landing alerts

    When a competitor launches a product that starts earning citations on prompts you used to own, you get a notification within 24 hours of the first citation. Includes the product URL, its schema, and the prompts where it's displacing you.

  • Policy-page change feed

    Competitor policies quietly shape the model's understanding of your category. When a competitor extends their returns window from 30 to 90 days, or starts citing new certifications, the change feed flags it. Critical context for the brand team.

  • Counter-move backlog

    Every competitive finding becomes a suggested fix: "Competitor X now has Warranty schema — recommend adding warranty spec to your product JSON-LD." The backlog feeds the Fix Pack so the counter-move is one click to preview and two clicks to ship.

Customer proof

Proof

“We pulled ahead in AI citations for skincare by watching what the number-three competitor did and deciding what to copy vs. what to do better. The weekly digest is the first email I open on Mondays.”
Sofia Morales · Brand Director, Verdelia Beauty

#1 → #3

competitor we passed on category SoAV

Pairs well with

Keep reading across the Surfient platform

FAQ

Questions, answered straight

  • How many competitors can I track?

    The Free plan includes 3 named competitors. Premium lifts that to 5. We've found that above 5, the signal-to-noise ratio drops — most merchants are better served by tracking a tight set of direct competitors weekly than by chasing a longer list that goes stale.

  • Is it ethical to scrape a competitor's site?

    We only read public content — product pages, collection pages, policy pages, published schema. Rate limits are conservative (one request every 2-3 seconds per competitor domain by default), we respect robots.txt rules, and we never log into a competitor's store or fetch anything behind authentication. The bar we hold ourselves to is: would we be comfortable if a competitor did this to us? Yes.

  • Can a competitor detect that I'm tracking them?

    It's technically possible for them to see our user-agent in their access logs if they're watching for it — we identify as SurfientIntelligenceBot with contact information. We don't hide the traffic. Our customers' identities are never disclosed. Competitors occasionally figure out that one of their competitors is using Surfient; they have no way to know which one.

  • Does intelligence data update in real time?

    No — weekly is the cadence. Real-time creates more noise than signal, and GEO moves on a scale of days, not hours. The weekly digest lands Monday morning. If a competitor makes a dramatic change (new SKU wins 5+ prompts in its first week), the new-SKU-landing alert fires between weekly runs.

  • What if a competitor blocks your crawler?

    Some do. When that happens, Competitor Intelligence gracefully degrades — we still capture their Share of AI Voice from the prompt panel (which doesn't touch their site), but schema and content-pattern analyses drop to the partial data we already had. The scoreboard notes which competitors are fully-instrumented vs. citation-only.

  • Can I export the raw intelligence data?

    Yes. CSV export at the weekly digest level is available on both Free and Premium. Premium adds JSON via the Surfient API at the individual-finding level, plus webhook delivery when a delta lands. Our customers have built custom alerting in Looker and automated executive decks in Google Slides from the API — everything you need is in the Premium plan at $39/month, no upsell.

Know exactly what your top 3 competitors are shipping on AI

Nominate three competitor domains on the free scan. We'll return their Share of AI Voice, their schema coverage, their lead-sentence patterns, and the prompts where they beat you — with the first three counter-moves already queued.

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