Competitors
What the Competitors page shows, how the leaderboard counts and ranks brands, how Fond decides two names are one brand, what tracking a competitor changes, and what the page cannot tell you.
Competitors, under Analytics → Competitors, shows which brands AI assistants bring up for your questions instead of you, and what they say. It uses organic visibility and average answer position as the glossary defines them.
The leaderboard
The Competitor Mentions table opens filtered to direct competitors and sorted by mentions. If an answer in the view mentioned your brand, you appear as a separate row marked You. No You row means that the view found you nowhere.
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Brand | The name of the brand. A merge mark means that the row counts other names too. Click the mark to see them. |
| Website | The site of the brand, when Fond knows it. Narrow screens hide this column. |
| Category | The kind of brand that Fond judged it to be. |
| Mentions | Answers that mentioned the brand, once each, however many times they named it. Under Organic, the non-organic figure is the mentions left out because the question named the brand. |
| Queries | Questions where at least one answer mentioned the brand. Under Organic, only questions that did not name it. |
| Rate | Queries as a share of the questions that ran. Under Organic, the share of the blind questions of the brand. |
| Avg Pos | Average answer position, from 1 for the top third of an answer to 3 for the bottom third. |
The Total and Organic tabs choose which mentions count. Organic, the default, counts each brand only on the questions that did not name it. The organic visibility entry explains what a question named.
Four things are easy to misread:
- Rate counts questions, not answers, unlike the mention rate on the Visibility page.
- n/a is not 0%. Under Organic, every question named the brand. Under Total, no questions ran.
- In Summary, Queries adds up across runs, and Rate divides by the questions of all runs together. A question that mentioned the brand on five runs counts five times.
- A question whose every answer failed did not run. It is not a miss for the brand.
Click a column header to sort, or a row to open its brand. Filters narrows the table by Query tier, Category and Tracking. The Category filter hides retailers, media and platforms until you change it. Search brands also matches merged names. The export downloads every matching row, with the variants, tracked state, and organic and non-organic counts.
In Summary, two figures sit above the table. Competitor rank is your place by organic rate among the brands in the chosen query tier and category. Only a strictly higher rate ranks above you, and the count beside the rank includes you. The Tracking filter and the search box do not change the rank.
Organic mention rate is your organic rate on the latest run in the range that can measure it. A run where assistants did not mention you, or where every question named you, has none, so the figure comes from the run before. Its change covers only the questions asked at both ends.
What to do with it
- Read the Organic lens first. Total rewards brands that your questions asked about. Organic shows who assistants bring up unprompted.
- Set Tracking to Not tracked. A brand near the top is one that assistants already treat as your competitor.
- Open the Mentions of a rival. The questions it wins, and the sentences it wins them with, show what assistants say about it.
- Track the rivals that matter and merge duplicates.
Track and merge brands
You can track up to five rivals for each website. Tracking changes no number here, but gives the row a Tracked badge, which the Tracking filter reads. You can merge names that are one company from the menu of a row, and a merge reinterprets every past run. Tracked competitors and brand merges covers both.
A competitor's page
The page of a brand keeps the Summary or Per run choice, lens and query tier of the leaderboard.
The standing line under the name gives the rank and visibility of the brand in the view. Fond ranks by mentions under the current lens. It ranks against every brand in the view, including retailers, media and you. So the rank can differ from the leaderboard. Visibility is the share of the questions in the view, or of its blind questions under Organic, where an answer mentioned the brand.
Mentions lists every answer in the view that mentioned the brand. A row shows the question, its tier and the assistant. It also shows where the brand first appears, whether the mention was organic, and the sentence around it. Via names the merged variant that Fond recorded. Click a question to see which brands its answers named. You can search, filter by assistant and export it.
Another row, such as yours, can hold the mentions of a brand on some days. The page then lists only the days when the brand had its own row, and how many. The You row opens the same view of your own brand.
Summary or one run
The Visibility guide describes the Summary and Per run control. Per run opens on the latest run.
- In Per run, the line under the title gives how many brands it shows and how many answers the run had.
- In Summary, the leaderboard adds the runs in your date range and says how many. When some runs found no brands, it adds partial and says how many runs contributed.
Movement over time
The What Changed tile on the website overview compares organic rates for the last 7 days with the 7 days before. It counts only questions answered in both. It lists the direct competitors that moved most. It leaves out small moves and brands with too few blind questions. Your own change follows the same rules, so it can be absent.
If Fond measured the two periods differently, for example with different assistants, the tile says so and does not compare.
To look further back, use a longer Summary range, or step through runs in Per run.
What the page does not measure
- Market share or sales. A brand that sells more can get fewer mentions.
- Share of voice. Share of voice, on the Visibility page, leaves out the mentions of a rival on questions that named you, so its counts can be lower.
- Questions that you do not track.
- Whether an answer recommended a brand. A warning counts the same as a recommendation, so read the sentence around it.
Citations
What the Citations page shows, what counts as a citation, how Fond sorts cited sites into categories, where "Get cited on" suggestions come from, and what citations cannot tell you.
Tracked competitors and brand merges
Which competitors you can track and what tracking changes, how Fond decides two names are one brand, and how to merge, rename or ungroup brands on the Competitors page.