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app.athenahq.ai/competitors

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Purpose

The Competitors page is the central hub for managing the brands you want to track across AI search engines. It allows you to configure exactly how AI detects mentions of your own brand and your competitors by managing keywords (identifiers) and website domains. Beyond configuration, this page serves as a performance dashboard. It ranks your tracked competitors by their visibility, surfaces new competitor brands the AI engines are talking about, and offers deep-dive head-to-head comparisons to help you understand where your brand leads or lags.

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What’s on the page

The page is organized into three tabs: Tracked competitors, Discovered competitors, and Deleted (which only appears if you have previously removed competitors).

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Identifier Suggestions Bar

If our system detects new potential keywords (identifiers) for your tracked brands based on how AI models are responding, a suggestion bar appears above the tables. It shows the number of suggestions and the suggested keyword, letting you quickly click Add or Dismiss. You can also click Review all to open a modal that lists all suggestions grouped by competitor.

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Pending Changes Bar

If you edit a brand’s identifiers, domains, name, or case-sensitivity, those changes are queued up. A bar appears showing a summary (e.g., “2 pending changes”) with a Review & backfill button. If a backfill is currently running, this bar shows live progress (e.g., “Reanalyzing X of Y responses”).

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Tracked competitors table

This is the main view showing your own website alongside every competitor you are currently monitoring.
  • (checkbox): Select rows to perform bulk actions (like deletion or exporting data).
  • Name: The name and logo of the competitor. Your own brand is pinned to the top and has a “You” badge. Clicking a competitor’s name opens a head-to-head comparison.
  • Visibility: Shows the brand’s rank and share-of-voice percentage. Tooltip: “Visibility - Based on mentions across tracked AI responses. Rank: Position among tracked brands. Share: Percent of all tracked mentions. Last 30 days”
  • Website: The primary URL for the brand. Features a click-to-copy tooltip and an external link icon. Shows ” - ” if no URL is recorded.
  • Identifiers: A dropdown showing the keywords used to detect the brand in AI responses. Tooltip: “We use these keywords to identify your brand in AI responses”
  • Domains: A dropdown showing the web domains used to track citations. *Tooltip: “Domains used for citation tracking. Supports wildcards (e.g. .acme.com)”
  • Added on: The date the competitor was added to your workspace. For competitors with a recorded activity history, this date is underlined and clickable.

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Discovered competitors table

When on the Discovered competitors tab, this table shows AI-surfaced brands that frequently appear alongside your tracked topics but aren’t currently being monitored.
  • Competitor: The candidate’s name and URL. Clicking the row expands it to show the specific AI response and text snippet that mentioned them.
  • Mention %: Tooltip: “Percentage of AI responses that mention this competitor”
  • Mentions: Tooltip: “Total number of times this competitor was mentioned across all responses”
  • Mentioned in: Tooltip: “Unique responses mentioning this competitor out of total analyzed”
  • Last seen: The date they were most recently mentioned.
  • Actions: An Add button to start tracking them, or an “Added” label if you already track them.

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Deleted competitors table

When on the Deleted tab, this table lists soft-deleted competitors. It contains the Name, Website, and an Actions column with a Restore button.

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Drilldowns

  • Head-to-Head Comparison: Clicking a competitor’s name (or selecting Compare performance from the actions menu) opens a side drawer titled “[Your brand] vs [Competitor]”. It features side-by-side metrics (Share of voice, Mention rate, Citation rate, Average position), a “Model breakdown” showing how often each AI engine mentions them versus you, and a “Where [Competitor] leads” section highlighting topics where they outperform you. From here, you can click View heatmap or View mentions to drill deeper into the data.
  • Competitor History: Clicking an underlined date in the “Added on” column opens a “[Competitor] history” drawer, showing a timeline of who added, edited, or modified the competitor and when.
  • Expanded Discovery Evidence: Clicking a row in the Discovered tab drops down a list of AI response snippets. Clicking one of those snippets opens the full AI response drawer to show exactly how the competitor was discussed.

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What you can do here

  • Add competitors: Click Add competitor to open a drawer. You can add a single brand manually, switch to the “Multiple” tab to paste a list of names/URLs, or upload a CSV/Excel file for bulk importing. The system can automatically use AI to generate tracking keywords for bulk imports.
  • Edit Identifiers: Click the Identifiers cell for any brand to open a dropdown. Here, you can type to add new keywords, hover over existing ones to delete or edit them, and toggle Match case to make matching case-sensitive.
  • Edit Domains: Click the Domains cell to add or remove tracked web domains. Hovering over a non-primary domain reveals a Make primary button.
  • Rename a competitor: Click the three-dot menu and select Edit to change the company’s display name. A prompt will ask if you want to automatically swap the old name out of the identifier list.
  • Delete / Restore: Use the three-dot menu to Delete a competitor (which requires confirmation). If you make a mistake, an undo toast appears for 8 seconds. Alternatively, go to the Deleted tab and click Restore.
  • Bulk Delete & Export: Select multiple rows using the checkboxes. A command bar will appear at the bottom allowing you to Delete them all at once or Export their data (Name, URL, Identifiers) to a CSV file.
  • Review & Backfill Changes: When you make edits (like adding a new identifier), they apply to future AI responses automatically. To apply them retroactively, click Review & backfill in the pending changes bar. This opens a dialog where you can review your queued edits, pick a date range, and click Start backfill (which consumes credits) or Skip backfill (to clear the queue without historical scanning). You can also Undo edits from this dialog.

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Data shown

  • Tracked/Discovered Competitors: Populated from your workspace configuration and our AI discovery pipeline, which constantly analyzes your tracked AI responses for unknown brands.
  • Visibility Metrics: Sourced from your tracked AI responses over the last 30 days.
  • Change Queue / Audit History: Sourced from your workspace’s activity logs and pending edit queue.

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Common workflows

Adding multiple competitors via file upload:
  1. Click Add competitor in the top right.
  2. Select the Multiple tab in the drawer.
  3. Under “Upload a CSV or Excel file”, click the file input and upload your list. (You can click “Download Template” first if you need the format).
  4. Review the preview list that appears. The system will alert you to duplicates or URLs you already own.
  5. Click Add [X] competitors to save them to your tracked list.
Updating a brand’s tracking keywords (Identifiers) and backfilling:
  1. Find the brand in the Tracked competitors table.
  2. Click its Identifiers dropdown, type a new keyword, and click Add.
  3. A pending changes bar appears at the top of the screen. Click Review & backfill.
  4. In the dialog, verify your changes. If you want the keyword to apply to older AI responses, ensure the time range is set correctly and click Start backfill.
Comparing your brand against a rival:
  1. Locate the rival in the Tracked competitors table.
  2. Click their name (or use the three-dot menu and select Compare performance).
  3. Review the “[Your brand] vs [Competitor]” drawer to see side-by-side share of voice and topic gaps.
  4. Click View heatmap at the bottom of the drawer to jump directly to a detailed visual breakdown of their performance.

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Empty, loading, and error states

  • Empty states: If you haven’t selected a website in the sidebar, a full-page “No website selected” message appears. If you have no discovered or deleted competitors, those tabs display “No discovered competitors yet” or “No deleted competitors”.
  • Loading states: While fetching data, the tables show animated skeleton rows. A blue loading bar traverses the top of the page during navigation.
  • Error states: If metrics fail to load, the Visibility column simply shows “Unavailable”. If the head-to-head comparison drawer partially fails, an amber banner appears with a “Retry” button.
  • Linked from: Users generally navigate here directly from the main sidebar navigation.
  • Links to: The Head-to-Head comparison drawer contains buttons linking directly to the Heatmap and Responses pages, automatically pre-filtered to focus on that specific competitor.

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Common support questions

Why is my own company in the competitors list? Your own brand is included (pinned at the top with a “You” badge) so you can manage your own identifiers and domains exactly the same way you manage your rivals. This ensures the system knows precisely how to detect mentions of your company. What does the “Match case” toggle do in the Identifiers dropdown? By default, identifiers are case-insensitive (e.g., “Apple” matches “apple”). If your brand name is a common word (like “Apple” or “Polo”), you can turn on “Match case” so the system only counts mentions when the capitalization matches exactly, reducing false positives. I added a new identifier, but my past mentions didn’t update. Why? Edits to identifiers or domains apply to new AI responses automatically. To apply them to older responses, you must click Review & backfill in the bar that appears at the top of the page, select a date range, and click Start backfill. Why is the “Make primary” button missing for some domains? You cannot promote a domain to be primary if it uses wildcards (e.g., *.acme.com). The primary domain must be a specific, exact website URL. What happens if a competitor doesn’t have a website? That is completely fine. When adding a competitor manually, you can just provide their name. The system will use the name as the primary identifier for tracking mentions.