How to Use ChatGPT/Gemini for Competitive Analysis

Since generative AI is clearly the future of brand and product discoverability, knowing where you are vs where your competitors are is key

Mar 09, 2024

How is your business positioned in generative AI knowledge bases? Is it coming up in AI-driven answers?

Since generative AI is clearly the future of brand and product discoverability, knowing where you are vs where your competitors are is key.

ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini can help with that analysis. Here are some essential prompts for that:

1. Identify your competitors

Knowing who ChatGPT assigns to be your competitors is useful for understanding how your brand is positioned within the AI knowledge base. For testing, I pretended to be a founder of Substack:

I am the founder of [BRAND]. Who are my competitors?

If your site or brand is pretty new, provide ChatGPT with detailed information on what you do and also prompt it to research your site and search for your brand to find more.

2. Which unique features do my competitors have?

This prompt can help founders to find a direction for product development and positioning. My prompt:

Create a table listing unique features from each competitor that none other offers and pricing

Make sure to ask ChatGPT how old its data is if it doesn’t provide that information right away. In my test, ChatGPT’s response was based on the April 2023 update.

3. Analyze your competitors’ audience

How are competitors’ sites positioning their products on their sites to target a particular audience? ChatGPT is great for that type of analysis. My prompt:

Go to each competitor's site and analyze what kind of audience they primarily focus on. Create a table: Competitor's site, primary audience, which site elements/pages made you think this is their target audience

4. Re-position your site based on competitive research

What should I do on my site to attract COMPETITOR’S audience? Use their website to come up with the most effective tactics.

5. Analyze social proof

Research COMPETITOR’S reviews and identify some gaps we could be covering with our site. What most of their users are complaining about or saying they wish the competitor had?

ChatGPT can be a great help in competitive analysis and discovering more (indirect) competitors you wouldn’t think of.

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BONUS TOOL!

Finally, to give you even more things to play, I have a new tool that tracks these types of answers for you!

Track AI Answers helps you monitor AI answers. It currently supports ChatGPT and Bing Chat, Google Bard/Gemini, and Bing AI Chat.

The tool allows you to monitor your name, company name, and top lists. Start by typing your or your company’s name; the tool will provide what AI knows about you or your brand. You can choose to monitor these results and the tool will search AI platforms for those names on a regular basis and email you if it finds that any of the platforms knows more about you.

You can also monitor “Top 10 lists” to learn when any of the AI platforms recommend you in their answers. For example, if you monitor AI answers for “Top 10 Food influencers in the UK”, the results will include all the names ChatGPT lists in a response to this query. The tool will also visualize the rankings (and changes in rankings) of those names in the answers: