Your strongest named competitor shows up in 92% of buyer-intent AI answers. The median brand we audit shows up in 0%.
An earlier post on this blog reported the distribution of mention rates across 270 brands, most clustering between 11% and 30%. That number blends branded queries (where the prompt names the brand outright) with organic buyer-intent queries. Pull those apart and ask a narrower question instead: in each panel, how far does the brand being audited trail the single named competitor that shows up the most? The answer is not a spread. It is close to a wall.
Every one of 270 panels trails its top named competitor
We recomputed this fresh from real, non-fixture data this session: 270 live audit panels across project management, customer support, and HR software, each panel naming the target brand plus five named competitors. For every panel, we isolated organic prompts only (buyer-intent queries that never name any brand, the honest test of discovery) and found the one named competitor with the highest organic mention rate in that specific panel, the brand actually winning the buyer-intent answers. Then we measured the gap between that competitor's organic mention rate and the target's own.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Panels where the target trails its top named competitor | 270 of 270 (100%) |
| Panels where the target leads or ties | 0 |
| Median gap (percentage points) | 90.9 |
| 25th / 75th percentile gap | 85.0 / 96.3 |
| Smallest gap observed, any panel | 22.7 |
| Largest gap observed, any panel | 100.0 |
Not one of the 270 panels ran the other direction. The tightest race we found anywhere in the dataset, a customer support software brand against Zendesk as the top named competitor, still had Zendesk ahead by 22.7 points. The typical panel is not close at all: a median gap of 90.9 points on a 0-100 scale.
Most of that gap is a flat zero on one side
Part of why the gap runs this wide: 254 of the 270 target brands (94.1%) had an organic mention rate of exactly zero. Not low. Zero. Meanwhile the named competitor we compared against was, by definition, the most visible brand in that same panel, with a median organic mention rate of 91.7% (25th percentile 85.7%, 75th percentile 96.5%). The gap is not two brands both getting some buyer-intent traffic with one ahead. It is one brand answering nearly every relevant buyer-intent prompt in the category, and the other answering almost none of them, in the same panel, same prompts, same four engines.
The gap is smallest in project management, still enormous everywhere
| Category | Panels | Median gap | 25th / 75th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project management software | 173 | 87.5 pts | 83.3 / 91.7 |
| HR software | 39 | 96.8 pts | 94.6 / 100.0 |
| Customer support software | 58 | 96.8 pts | 94.0 / 100.0 |
Project management software has the largest brand pool and the most crowded category, which is exactly why its gap runs slightly narrower: with more players splitting organic mentions, no single competitor concentrates quite as much of the answer. HR and customer support software have fewer serious named players, so the leader in those categories tends toward near-total ownership of the organic answer, a median gap of 96.8 points in both.
Why this framing matters more than a raw score
A brand told it scored 0% on organic mention rate can read that as an abstract number, disconnected from anything concrete. A brand told that its named competitor answers the exact same buyer-intent prompts a median of 92% of the time, on the same four engines, has a different kind of number: a specific, already-winning competitor to study. The fix is not generic AI-visibility advice. It is finding what page, source, or listing gets that specific competitor cited in those specific responses, and closing the gap to a brand that has already proven the category is winnable.
Find out which named competitor already owns your buyer-intent AI answers, and exactly how large the gap is.
Get an AI Visibility Audit, $490Methodology
Data drawn from 270 live, search-grounded audit panels (project management, customer support, and HR software brands, 173/58/39 split), each panel naming the target brand plus five named competitors and run across four AI engines: ChatGPT with web search, Gemini with grounding, Perplexity Sonar, and Claude with web search. We recomputed organic mention rate (buyer-intent prompts that never name any brand) for the target and every named competitor fresh from each panel's results.jsonl via engine/scorer.ts this session, then took, per panel, the named competitor with the highest organic mention rate as the "top named competitor" and measured the percentage-point gap to the target's own organic mention rate. No development-rail or fixture data is included; all 270 panels are live engine calls, verified by directory scan before use. Data collected June-August 2026.