Add your competitors
Listing your competitors turns the Share of voice card from a bare mention count into a comparison, and it is what lets MarqIQ suggest new questions from the answers where a rival is named and you are not. You can add up to eight, at setup or at any time afterwards. To read what the card then shows, go on to How to read your AI visibility score.
Before you start
Set up the brand profile first. Competitors are cleaned against your brand name and your domain, so there has to be a profile to clean them against.
Note
Competitors are counted from the next run, never retroactively. Adding a rival today does not change what an earlier run recorded.
Add or change the list
The list lives on the Brand profile card at the bottom of the Overview tab. It can also be typed once during setup, in the Competitors field on the Set up your brand profile card.
Open AI Answer Visibility and scroll to Brand profile.
Click Edit beside the competitor line.
With none listed, the line reads "Competitors: none listed, so share of voice has nothing to compare against".
Type the names into Competitors, separated by commas.
The field says the rules on screen: comma-separated, up to 8, your own brand and repeated names dropped, counted from the next run.
Click Save.
MarqIQ cleans the list as it saves and shows you what it kept, so a name that was dropped is visible straight away rather than at the next run.
Run a visibility check to see the comparison.
Until the next run finishes, Share of voice still shows the last run's figures, which were counted against the list as it stood then.
What the list may hold
| Limit | Value | What happens past it |
|---|---|---|
| Competitors kept | 8 | The ninth onwards are dropped. The count is taken after duplicates and your own brand are removed, so a repeated name never costs a real rival its place. |
| Characters in one name | 80 | A longer name is cut to 80 and kept. |
| Your own brand | Never kept | Dropped by name or by domain, so it can never compete with itself. Renaming the brand drops a competitor that has become the brand. |
| Repeated names | Folded | Compared with accents folded, whitespace collapsed and case ignored, so "Beta" and "beta" are one rival. The first spelling you typed is the one kept. |
The same cleaning is applied when an older list is read, so a profile saved before these rules existed still scores correctly.
Choose names an engine would actually write
- Use the name as buyers and reviewers write it, not the legal entity: "Ramp", not "Ramp Business Corporation".
- List the rivals you lose deals to, not everyone in the category. Eight places go quickly.
- A competitor whose name is an everyday word — Ramp, Focus, Close — is matched under the same strict rule your own brand would be, so it needs a capital and a product reading to count. Read How MarqIQ decides you were mentioned before you conclude a rival is invisible.
- Adding a competitor never changes your own visibility score. It only adds a row to compare against.
What the list changes on screen
- Share of voice — your mentions against each listed rival across the run's scored answers, counted once per answer per name. The card shows the top eight rows and your own brand is one of them, so with all eight competitor slots used the lowest-scoring rival falls off the chart.
- Your position in an answer — your rank among the tracked names, counted from where you first appear by name or by domain.
- Suggest prompts on the Prompts tab — suggestions come from answers that name or cite a listed competitor and neither name nor cite you. With no competitors listed, the card says there is nothing to suggest.
- Recommendations — the outreach and content items are drawn from the same gaps.
Note
With no competitors listed, Share of voice shows your mention count and says plainly that there is nothing to compare against. A share of your own mentions over themselves would read as 100% with nothing behind it, so it is not shown.
If it did not work
A name you typed is missing after you saved
Why: It was your own brand or your domain, a repeat of a name already in the list, blank after trimming, or past the eighth place.
Fix: Read the line the card shows after saving — it is the list MarqIQ kept. Re-add the name with a different spelling only if it is genuinely a different company.
Share of voice has not changed since you added a rival
Why: Competitors are counted from the next run. The card is still showing the last finished run, which was scored against the earlier list.
Fix: Click Run visibility check on the Overview tab. The comparison appears once that run finishes.
A rival you listed shows zero mentions
Why: Either the engines genuinely did not name them in this run's answers, or the name is an everyday word whose hits were not confirmed.
Fix: Open an answer's excerpt on the Prompts tab and look for the name. If it is there in lowercase, or joined by a hyphen, it was read as the ordinary word — that is the rule, and it applies to your brand too.
Every brand, yours included, shows zero
Why: No brand at all appeared in this run's answers. The card says so in as many words.
Fix: Check the run's health line first: a run where most calls failed has little text to find anything in. Then check that your prompts ask at category level rather than about a concept nobody answers with a product list.
A competitor appears in the breakdown that is not in your list
Why: The name was stored on an answer in that run, while the list has changed since. Breakdowns are rebuilt from the answers still stored.
Fix: Run a new check. The next run counts only the list you have now.
The list cannot be saved at all
Why: There is no brand profile yet, so there is nothing to attach the list to. The message reads "Set up the brand profile first."
Fix: Complete Set up your brand profile on the Overview tab, which is where competitors can also be typed in the first place.
Next steps
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