> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surnex.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# AI competitors

> Which brands dominate the AI answers for a topic.

**GEO → AI Competitors** analyzes a topic and reports the domains that appear in AI answers for it — your competition for AI visibility, which is often not the same set as your competition for rankings.

## Running an analysis

Enter a topic in **Enter a keyword to analyze…** and submit. The result lists the domains appearing in AI answers for that query.

One topic per analysis. Run your most important topics individually rather than trying to cover everything at once.

## Reading the results

The finding usually isn't the ranking order — it's who's on the list.

**Domains you don't compete with organically.** AI answers regularly cite publications, documentation sites, forums, and comparison sites over vendors. If those dominate your topic, the path to visibility runs through being covered by them rather than through outranking them.

**Competitors ahead of you here but behind you in search.** This is the signal that AI visibility is a distinct problem. A competitor you outrank who dominates the AI answer has content structured to be quoted — go and read the page being cited.

**Consistency across topics.** Run several related topics. A domain appearing in all of them is a category authority; one appearing in a single topic got lucky or is genuinely specialist in that niche.

## AI competitors vs. search competitors

|                    | AI competitors                      | [Tracking comparison](/tracking/competitors)        |
| ------------------ | ----------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------- |
| Measures           | Who appears in AI answers           | Who ranks in search results                         |
| Domains            | Discovered from the answer          | Your configured [competitor list](/competitors/add) |
| Typical membership | Publications, docs, forums, vendors | Direct commercial rivals                            |

The two lists overlapping only partially is normal, not a sign something is wrong. Search rewards pages that match a query; AI answers reward sources that explain a subject.

## Acting on it

For each domain consistently appearing in your topics, decide which it is:

* **A publication or comparison site** — outreach. Being listed there feeds the answer.
* **A community or forum** — participate honestly. These are heavily cited and rarely contested by vendors.
* **A documentation site** — usually a vendor's own. If a competitor's docs are cited for a general question, they've written genuinely useful reference material and you can too.
* **A direct competitor** — read the cited page and compare it against yours for directness and structure.

## Variance

AI responses aren't deterministic, so run a topic more than once before treating the list as settled. Domains that appear every time are the real competition; ones that appear once may not be.

For tracking this over time rather than in a one-off analysis, the [snapshot history](/geo/topics) on a tracked topic does the same thing on a schedule.

## Related

* [GEO overview](/geo/overview) — tracking topics continuously
* [Topic detail](/geo/topics) — cited sources and full responses for a tracked topic
* [Citation gap](/ai/citation-gap) — comparing named competitors across many keywords at once