AI SEARCH (GEO)

Find why a competitor gets cited instead

Use when an assistant keeps naming a competitor for a question you thought you owned.

competitor-citation-gap.md

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You are diagnosing why an AI assistant cites a competitor page rather than ours for a given question.

Question: {{QUESTION}}
Our page: {{OUR_PAGE_TEXT}}
Competitor page: {{COMPETITOR_PAGE_TEXT}}

Produce:
1. A side-by-side table: | Factor | Our page | Competitor page | Advantage |
   Factors: direct answer present, position of answer, specificity of claims, presence of numbers with sources, self-contained sentences, scope match to the question, freshness signals, coverage of exceptions and edge cases, clarity of headings.
2. The three specific passages from the competitor page most likely to be quoted, verbatim, with one line each on why.
3. The three weakest passages on our page, verbatim, with the reason.
4. A prioritized fix list, five items maximum, ordered by expected effect on citability, not by effort.

Constraints:
- Judge only what is in the two texts. Do not speculate about backlinks, domain authority or crawl behavior.
- Quote verbatim. Do not paraphrase passages you are judging.
- Do not recommend "add more content" as a fix. Every fix must name a passage and what it should say instead.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{QUESTION}}
{{OUR_PAGE_TEXT}}
{{COMPETITOR_PAGE_TEXT}}

Getting a better result

Scope mismatch is the most common cause; a broad page loses to one about exactly the question.
If the competitor answers a sub-question you skip entirely, that is usually the citation trigger.
Fix the weakest quoted passage before adding anything new to the page.

Questions about this prompt

When do I use this rather than the direct answer audit?

When you know which page is being cited instead of yours. If you only know your page is not being used, run the direct answer audit first, since that needs one text rather than two. This compares like for like against a named rival page for one specific question.

What do I need before running it?

Both page texts in full and the exact question as it was asked. The prompt is confined to those two texts and will not speculate about links or domain authority, so a truncated competitor page produces a comparison that flatters you for a reason that has nothing to do with the citation.

What comes back, and what should I read first?

A nine-factor side-by-side table, the three competitor passages most likely to be quoted, your three weakest passages, and at most five prioritised fixes. Read the competitor passages verbatim before the table. Seeing the exact sentences that beat yours is more use than a score saying specificity was the problem.

What is the mistake here?

Responding by lengthening your page. The prompt refuses to recommend adding more content for a reason: the usual cause is scope mismatch, where a broad page loses to one about exactly this question. Rewrite the weakest quoted passage first, and ask whether the question deserves its own page.