Competitor Tracking Overview
Surva.ai monitors your competitors across every layer of online visibility: AI search answers, paid ads, organic rankings, and landing page changes. When you add a competitor, Surva.ai begins tracking them across all your monitored prompts and triggers background enrichment to build a complete competitive picture.
Adding Competitors
Navigate to Competitors in the sidebar and click Add Competitor. Enter the competitor domain and Surva.ai will automatically fetch their favicon, crawl their landing page, retrieve their top organic keywords (up to 50), and collect ad data if your plan includes ads tracking. Background enrichment is capped at 25 competitors per account to manage API costs.
You can also edit a competitor's name or domain directly from both the list page and the detail page. If you change a competitor's domain, all associated data (ads, keywords, landing pages, organic positions) is cleared and re-collected from scratch for the new domain.
Competitors Table
The main competitors page shows a sortable table with these columns:
- Competitor - name with favicon, clickable to open the detail page
- Domain - external link to the competitor's website
- Visibility - AI visibility percentage shown as a circular progress ring
- Best Rank - best organic search position, color-coded: green for positions 1-3, blue for 4-10, gray for 11+
- Ads - count of active ads. Shows a lock icon linking to billing on Starter plans that lack ads tracking
- AI Mentions - count of mentions in AI chatbot responses
- Source - badge showing how the competitor was added: Manual, Ads, AI, Search, or Legacy
- Monitor - deep tracking toggle or "Upgrade" badge for Starter plan users
- Actions - refresh, edit, and delete buttons
Click any column header to sort. Click again to reverse sort direction.
Filter Tabs
Three tabs filter the competitor list:
- All - shows every competitor with a count badge
- Manual - competitors you added by hand
- AI Discovered - competitors found automatically from ads, organic results, and AI answers
Auto-Discover Competitors
The Auto-Discover toggle in the page header controls automatic competitor discovery across your account. When enabled (default), Surva.ai extracts advertiser URLs from ads data, organic results, and AI responses during keyword refreshes and adds them as discovered competitors. Up to 100 competitors can be auto-discovered per account.
A global blacklist prevents common non-competitor domains (Amazon, Wikipedia, Reddit, major news sites, government domains, etc.) from being added. If you delete an auto-discovered competitor, it is excluded from future discovery. Manually re-adding a deleted competitor clears the exclusion.
Standard Tracking
Every added competitor gets standard tracking automatically, which includes:
- AI Mentions - how often the competitor appears in AI responses to your tracked prompts
- AI Citations - links to competitor domains included in AI answers
- Organic Rankings - competitor keyword positions in traditional search
- Visibility Share - percentage of your prompts that mention each competitor
Deep Tracking (Enhanced Monitoring)
Deep tracking is a premium feature that provides additional competitive intelligence. Enable it from the Monitor toggle column on the Competitors page. When deep tracking is enabled for a competitor, Surva.ai collects:
- Ad Creatives - full ad headlines, descriptions, display URLs, and first/last seen dates via Google Ads Transparency Center and DataForSEO
- Landing Page Content - page titles, headlines, messaging, value propositions, feature lists, and CTAs
- Landing Page Change Tracking - detects and logs when competitors update their landing page messaging
- AI Mentions Discovery - discovers prompts where the competitor appears across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini
- Paid Keyword Attribution - links competitors to the keywords they bid on
See the Deep Tracking guide for plan limits, refresh schedules, and implementation details.
Competitor Detail Page
Click any competitor to see a detailed breakdown. The header shows summary metrics including AI Visibility percentage, Share of Voice, Active Ads count, Prompts with AI presence, and Brand Mentions found in AI responses.
Eight tabs organize the detail data:
- Overview - AI visibility over time chart with 30-day and 3-month toggle, plus per-engine breakdown (Google AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini)
- AI Visibility - per-engine mention breakdown with bar charts
- Prompts - tracked prompts where this competitor appears in AI responses
- Brand Mentions - discovered prompts from AI responses that mention this competitor
- Ads Library - full history of ad creatives with first and last seen dates. Requires Growth plan or higher; Starter users see a blurred preview with an upgrade overlay
- Backlinks - domain backlink data. Requires Business plan; other plans see a blurred preview with upgrade overlay
- Messaging - landing page analysis showing headlines, CTAs, features, benefits, and pricing extracted from the competitor's site
- Website - current landing page summary and change history with a refresh button. Available on Growth plan and above
Deleting a Competitor
Click the delete icon and confirm in the modal. Deleting permanently removes all competitor data including ad history, organic rankings, AI mentions, landing page analysis, and messaging themes. Deleted auto-discovered competitors are excluded from future auto-discovery.
Own Brand Competitor
Surva.ai automatically creates an "own brand" competitor record for your brand during onboarding. This is used internally to calculate your visibility share relative to competitors and powers the comparison features throughout the platform.