What does adding a competitor do?
Adding a competitor tells Attensira to look for that brand in the answers it is already collecting. No extra runs are issued and no extra prompts are consumed. Every answer from every tracked prompt is re-read for the competitor’s name and domain, and the result becomes a competitor share of voice and citation rate next to your own. Because the analysis runs over answers you already have, a competitor added today is measured against answers collected from that point forward, on the same daily cadence as everything else. Competitors do not consume prompt slots. Add a competitor by domain —example.com — rather than by display name. The domain is what makes a citation attributable; the brand name is what makes a mention detectable. Attensira uses both.
You can add one programmatically with the add_competitor MCP tool. See MCP overview.
How are competitors suggested at signup?
At signup you choose your competitors from suggestions instead of typing a list. While the agents set up your workspace, they store up to ten rivals named on your site and in its analysis as candidates. A candidate is not a competitor yet: no share of voice, rival table, rollup or agent tool includes one. The only thing that reads candidates is the reading of answers, so the step can say how often each one was named before you choose. The suggestions on the competitors step come from three places, in this order:- Brands the free scan’s answers named, with the count: “Named in 11 of 150 answers”.
- Domains those answers cited beside yours.
- Candidates no answer has named yet, from your site, ranked last.
The one question
The agents check each candidate against your business profile: is it in the same market as you? When they are confident, nothing is asked. When they are unsure, they ask you about exactly one candidate, inline: track it, or leave it out. That candidate starts unticked, because ticking it would be answering for you. The check never tracks a rival on its own. Only your choice does.When you continue
- The ticked suggestions, and the ones you added, become tracked competitors.
- The rest are removed, and never reach a share figure.
- The scan’s answers are read again against the competitors you chose, so your first numbers use your list.
- If the question was still unanswered, it goes to your Inbox as a decision, once per domain, and that candidate is kept until you answer.
What gets measured for a competitor?
The same two rates you get for yourself, over the same runs:- Share of voice — successful runs that name the competitor, divided by all successful runs.
- Citation rate — successful runs that attach a URL on the competitor’s domain, divided by all successful runs.
Why don’t competitor rates add up to 100%?
Because a single answer can name several brands at once, and every rate is measured against the same denominator: all successful runs in the window. Each brand is scored independently — “was this brand named in this answer, yes or no” — so the rates overlap by design and routinely total well over 100%. They can also total under 100%, when many answers name nobody you track. Every competitive product you have used implies the opposite. Share of voice, market share, ranking positions — these all divide a fixed pie and sum to one. Attensira does not, because an assistant answering “what are the best expense tools for a small agency?” does not pick a winner. It lists five.A worked example
Ten successful runs of one prompt. Here is what the answers contained:
That totals 170%. Nothing is wrong. Acme appears in seven of ten answers; you appear in five; they appear together five times. Run 7 named nobody, and it still sits in every denominator — an answer that ignored the whole category is real evidence, not a missing data point.
The practical consequence: your share of voice going up does not require a competitor’s to go down. You can both rise, if models start naming more products per answer. Read each rate as “how often is this brand in the room,” never as “what slice of the room does this brand own.”
The
share_of_voice field holds the rate defined above, on the denominator defined above. It is not a slice of a total and it does not sum to one across brands.How do I compare a competitor fairly?
Compare like against like. Both rates come from the same runs, the same prompts, the same model surfaces and the same days, so a difference between two brands on one topic is a real difference. A difference between two topics is not, because the prompts differ. Watch the counts. Rates arrive as{value, n}, and n is the number of successful runs behind the number. A competitor at 100% off three runs and one at 62% off eighty are not comparable claims. A value of null means not measured — no successful run — while 0 with a non-zero n is a real, measured absence.
Changes carry {value, real}. Attensira applies a two-proportion z-test at 95% before it reports a movement. Below that noise floor you get {real: false, value: null}, which means “no change we can prove.” Do not read it as flat, and do not put it in a board deck as zero.
Finally, remember what a competitor rate is not: it is not traffic, not revenue, and not a ranking. It is the frequency with which a model, asked your buyers’ questions, brings a brand up. See Models for how the surfaces you track shape that number.