How do I find which AI engines cite my competitors?

List your real competitors and your category prompts, then run each prompt in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek. Log which engine names which competitor and which source it cited. Plot it as an engine-by-competitor grid. The pattern shows which engines your rivals own and which sources feed them, so you know exactly where to compete.

Start with two lists: competitors and prompts

You cannot map citations you have not defined. Before you open a single chatbot, write down two things.

• Your real competitors. Not the aspirational list. The 4-8 brands that actually show up when a buyer compares options in your category. Include the ones you lose deals to, not just the market leaders.
• Your category prompts. The questions a buyer types when they are still deciding, phrased naturally. "Best project management tool for a 20-person startup" beats "project management software". Aim for 5-15 prompts spanning best-of, comparison, and use-case queries.

These two lists are the axes of the map you are about to build. Spend time here. A vague competitor list or a keyword-stuffed prompt list produces a map you cannot act on.

Run each prompt across all five engines

The point is coverage. A competitor can be invisible in Claude and dominate Perplexity, and you will only see that if you check every engine. Work through this in order:

1. Open a fresh, logged-out session in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek. Logged-out avoids your personal history skewing the answer.
2. Paste the first prompt into each engine, one at a time.
3. Read the full answer. Note every competitor named, in what order, and with what framing (recommended, mentioned in passing, or dismissed).
4. Open the citations. Perplexity and Gemini show sources inline. In ChatGPT, click through the linked references. Record the exact URL or domain behind each competitor mention.
5. Repeat for every prompt. Same wording each time, so the results are comparable.

Two caveats. Answers vary run to run, so a single pass is a snapshot, not a law. And DeepSeek and Claude cite sources less consistently than Perplexity, so expect gaps in those columns.

Build a competitor-citation map

Turn your notes into a grid: engines down the side, competitors across the top. Each cell holds whether that engine named that competitor and the source it leaned on. Here is a filled-in example for the prompt below.

"What is the best project management tool for a 20-person startup?"

Even this small grid tells a story. Asana is named by all five engines, so it owns the category. Perplexity and Gemini both lean on third-party sources (G2, Zapier, Reddit) rather than the vendors' own sites, while ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek name brands without showing their work.

Read the map: where your rivals win and why

Two questions turn the grid into a plan.

• Which engines does each competitor own? Scan down each column. A competitor named in all five is a category default you have to displace everywhere. One named only in Perplexity has a source advantage you can copy in a single channel.
• Which sources are feeding them? Scan the cells for recurring domains. If G2, a Zapier listicle, and a Reddit thread keep appearing behind your rivals, those pages are the real battleground. Getting your brand onto them moves more than any amount of on-site copy.

The map also shows your own gaps by absence. If your brand never appears in the Perplexity column but your rivals do, and Perplexity is citing G2 and listicles, your next move is obvious: earn placement in those exact sources, not just publish another blog post on your own domain.

Run the same prompts monthly. Citations shift as engines re-crawl and as your rivals publish, so a map is only useful if it is current. The trend matters more than any single snapshot.

avisibli is the GEO platform that publishes this answer library. Self-references are limited to topics where a tool-based answer is genuinely useful to readers.