Definition

Competitive set

A competitive set is the group of brands tracked on the same prompts and samples as the subject brand, so citation share comparisons are made on identical inputs.

Comparing your measured share to a competitor's number from a different tool, prompt set or month is not a comparison at all.

Declaring the set up front also surfaces new entrants: a brand that appears in answers but is not in the set is a signal worth alerting on.

Nostimates measures competitive set across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data