Three tools tied for first: Ahrefs, Semrush and Similarweb were each named in all 6 of the 6 answers ChatGPT and Gemini gave when we asked, six different ways, who makes the best competitor analysis tools. No other product was named in every answer. If a buyer asks an assistant to name a competitor analysis tool this week, those three are the safe bet to appear every single time.
We ran this on 2026-08-06: six buyer questions, one live web search each, put to ChatGPT and Gemini, recording every product named and every source domain behind the answers. Across the six answers, 15 different products were named at least once, but only 8 of them were named more than once. The long tail is real, and we name all of it below.
The shortlist that holds no matter how you ask
Just under the top three sits a stable second tier: Contify, Crayon and Moz Pro were each named in 5 of the 6 answers (83%), and Sprout Social in 4 of 6 (67%). AlphaSense rounded out the regulars at 3 of 6 (50%). So the working shortlist a competitor-analysis buyer actually sees from ChatGPT and Gemini today is eight names deep: three near-locks and five regulars, before you reach the products that showed up only once.
One word changed the list: best vs free vs affordable
The most useful thing in this data is how far the shortlist moved when we changed a single word in the question. The bare "best competitor analysis tools" query, one of the six, named eight products, and Seranking appeared there and in none of the other five answers, its only mention in the whole measurement.
Ask for "best free competitor analysis tools" and you get what is almost a different product category. Of the six answers, only the free one named Google Alerts, SpyFu, Screaming Frog and Apify, four names that appear nowhere else. Just the top three, Ahrefs, Semrush and Similarweb, carried over into the free answer. Every mid-tier suite, Contify, Crayon, Moz Pro, Sprout Social and AlphaSense, dropped out of it completely.
"Most affordable competitor analysis tools" sounds like a synonym for free, but it produced nearly the opposite list. It brought the paid suites straight back, Contify, Crayon, Moz Pro and AlphaSense, and added Owler as its own one-question-only name. The free answer and the affordable answer overlapped on exactly three products, the same big three, and agreed on nothing else. To an assistant, "free" and "affordable" are not the same question, and a vendor that is affordable but not free can be erased by the wrong word.
The last two phrasings leaned on the core. "Competitor analysis tools recommendations" surfaced Klue for its only appearance in the six answers, while "best competitor analysis tools for small teams" and "what competitor analysis tools should I use" produced no unique names at all, just the regulars. Add it up and 7 of the 15 products we saw owe their entire presence to a single phrasing of the question.
The source map: Reddit, roundups, and vendors' own pages
Every one of the six answers cited Reddit. reddit.com was the only source to appear in all 6, including the free answer, whose other sources barely overlapped with the rest. Quora appeared in 2 of 6. Community threads, not directories, were the backbone of these recommendations.
Roundup pages did the next-heaviest lifting. Zapier's list was cited in 5 of 6 answers, YouTube in 4, and Figma's blog in 3. Smaller roundups filled the rest: cotera.co and visualping.io at 2 answers each, then HubSpot's blog, Search Engine Land, Metricool, seranking.com and a handful of others at 1 answer apiece.
Here is the insight worth taking home. Vendors' own domains fed the answers, and the vendors that pulled that off got named. contify.com was cited in 5 of 6 answers, tied with Zapier as the most-cited source behind Reddit, and Contify the product was named in 5 of 6. sproutsocial.com was cited in 4 answers, and Sprout Social was named in 4. Even SpyFu and Seranking each earned their single mention off their own domain being the page the assistant cited. Publishing your own "best competitor analysis tools" roundup is one of the few citation sources you fully control, and in this category it plainly worked.
What never showed up: G2 and Capterra. The two review directories most B2B teams assume drive these lists were cited zero times across all 6 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini built their shortlists from Reddit, roundup blogs, YouTube and vendor sites, not from directory star ratings.
What we'd do to get named in this category
If we sold a competitor analysis tool, we would stop treating visibility as a market-share problem, because this data says market share is not what decides it. The source list decides it. We would work to be present in the exact pages these answers cite: the Reddit threads that fed all 6 answers, the Zapier roundup cited in 5, the YouTube roundups in 4, and, most of all, our own domain, because Contify at 5 of 6 and Sprout Social at 4 of 6 prove a vendor page can be both the cited source and the named product. One genuinely useful page can be the citation that puts you on the list, the way spyfu.com put SpyFu onto the free answer with a single mention.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Semrush | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Similarweb | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Contify | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Crayon | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Moz Pro | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Sprout Social | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| AlphaSense | 3 of 6 | 50% |
The remaining seven products were each named in 1 of 6 answers (17%): Seranking, Google Alerts, SpyFu, Screaming Frog, Apify, Owler and Klue. Five of those seven owe that single mention to either the "free" or the "most affordable" question.
Where Glotier fits, and where it doesn't
Glotier was named in 0 of the 6 answers, which is exactly right: Glotier is an AI-visibility tool, not a competitor analysis tool, so it should not appear on this list, and we are not going to pretend it did. Honest measurement only counts when it also reports the zeros.
But the page you just read is the entire thing Glotier does, pointed at a category that is not ours. Six buyer questions, every product the assistants named, every source domain behind the answers, run for your category instead of this one. If you want to see your own version, the check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.