Manage competitors

Register competitors so they appear in SOV, Top Brands, and gap analysis.

Last updated: 2026-05-05

TL;DR — Register competitors so they appear in SOV, the "Competitors only" view of Top Brands, gap analysis, and competitor perception. Add them from Brands → your brand → Competitors. New competitors are auto-tagged against the last 30 days of historical scan data, so you don't have to re-run scans to see them in dashboards.

Why register competitors at all

AI engines mention many tangential brands when they answer category questions — partners, integrations, distantly-related products, and things that just happened to share a keyword. If you treated every mentioned brand as a competitor, your dashboards would be noisy and your insights misleading.

Registering competitors is the explicit signal that tells Pranas: "these specific brands are the ones I actually compete with." Once registered, competitors:

• Power Share of Voice (SOV) calculations
• Appear in the Top Brands → Competitors only view
• Drive gap analysis (which features/concepts they own that you don't)
• Get their own Brand Perception comparison data
• Show up in co-occurrence competitor pairings
• Trigger Action Center recommendations

Unregistered brands still appear in raw Top Brands as "AI-suggested" — useful for discovery, but not used for competitive analytics.

Step-by-step: add a competitor

1. Open Brands in the sidebar, select your brand.
2. Click the Competitors tab.
3. Click Add competitor.
4. Enter:
   • Name (required) — the canonical name
   • Website (optional but recommended — used for favicon and sometimes positioning extraction)
   • Country (optional — leave blank for global; see Country scoping)
   • Aliases (optional — alternative names you want to count as the same competitor)
5. Click Save.

The competitor is immediately available in dashboards. Within seconds, an automatic 30-day retro-tagging job runs against your historical scan data so the competitor appears in past dashboards too.

Auto-detection

When AI Scans run, Pranas extracts every brand mentioned in responses. If a brand is mentioned frequently in your category but isn't yet registered, it appears in the Top Brands widget with an "AI-suggested" badge. From there you can register it with one click — Pranas pre-fills the name and (when possible) the website.

This is the recommended discovery flow:

1. Run scans with no registered competitors.
2. Review the AI-suggested brands in Top Brands.
3. Register the ones that are genuine competitors.
4. The dashboard now reflects competitive reality, not noise.

Worked example

Maya runs Acme Feedback. After her first scan, Top Brands shows:

• Canny (62 mentions, AI-suggested) ← real competitor
• ProductBoard (44, AI-suggested) ← real competitor
• Linear (31, AI-suggested) ← integration partner, not a competitor
• Frill (28, AI-suggested) ← real competitor
• Notion (22, AI-suggested) ← tangential

She registers Canny, ProductBoard, and Frill. Linear and Notion stay unregistered. After registration:

• The Competitors only view of Top Brands shows just the three real competitors.
• SOV recalculates: Acme 12% vs. registered competitors → meaningful number.
• Gap analysis flags features Canny and ProductBoard own that Acme doesn't.
• Brand Perception now compares Acme directly against Canny and ProductBoard side-by-side.

Country scoping

Each competitor can have a country, or no country at all:

• No country (global): appears in every country's dashboard.
• Country set: only appears when the dashboard's country filter matches that country (or is "All").

Use country scoping when a competitor is regional. For example, Klarna is a strong competitor in EU markets but less relevant in the US — set its country to "Sweden" or leave empty depending on your strategy.

Edge cases & gotchas

• Duplicate detection: adding "Canny" when "Canny.io" exists shows a merge prompt. Always dedupe.
• Competitor is also a parent brand of yours: rare, but possible (e.g. you compete with one product within a parent's portfolio). Register at the level you actually compete at.
• Aliases collide with your brand: if a competitor alias matches your own brand alias, your brand wins (your data is canonical for your workspace).
• Historical retro-tag scope: the auto-retag covers 30 days back. If you need older history re-tagged, run a fresh scan or contact support.
• Removing a competitor: removes them from future analytics. Past scan data still contains the raw mentions but they no longer power competitor metrics.

Troubleshooting

Related articles

• Manage your brands
• Country scoping
• Top Brands
• Share of Voice
• Co-occurrence
• Gap analysis

Still need help?

Email contact@pranas.co — share your brand and the competitors you're trying to register or merge.