How AI ranks you against the competitor set
Visibility tells you whether you're in the answer. Competitive Mind Share tells you where you sit in it, first or fourth, leader or alternative, named or implied. It's the AI-era version of share-of-voice, measured on the surface that's replacing search.
Being mentioned is binary. Being mentioned first, with the leader framing, while your competitor is listed as 'a smaller alternative' is not. Order, framing, and adjective choice add up to a measurable competitive position inside the answer.
Buyers read AI answers top-down and stop early. The brand named first carries disproportionate consideration weight. Mind share captures that.
Define your competitor set (typically 3–7 brands). We run shared prompts across all 8 AI models. For each response we measure: order of appearance, framing label (leader, challenger, alternative, niche), adjective tone, and whether the response recommends a specific brand at the end.
Results are aggregated into a weekly mind share index per model and a blended cross-model index. Drift in mind share is alerted the same way perception drift is.
Two patterns drive action. First: if a competitor is consistently named first across models, identify the shared source pattern feeding that primacy, usually a few high-authority pages where they appear and you don't. Second: if framing labels degrade ('alternative' replacing 'leader'), look at the new sources changing the narrative.
Mind share data also tells you which prompts to defend. The prompts your buyer actually asks are the prompts worth fighting for.