Tracking your competitors in AI Overviews helps you see where you stand. For example, if your site shows up in AI Overviews 2% of the time but a competitor shows up 20% of the time, you know there’s room for improvement.

Plus, if you find a competitor that’s doing really well in AI Overviews, you can learn from them. Try to figure out what they’re doing right and apply those insights to your own site to boost your success.

Using Ziptie.dev to track competitors

There are two ways to track your competitors using ZipTie. 

1. Track competitors separately

This approach gives you the most detailed view of how each competitor is performing. Here’s how you can do it:

  1. Create a list of keywords relevant to your niche. You can use tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to find keywords that matter to your audience.
  2. Set up separate projects for each competitor in ZipTie. 
  3. Now you can analyze detailed stats for each competitor. For example, you might find that a competitor ranks in the top 10 for 85% of the keywords but doesn’t appear in AI Overviews at all. 

This clearly indicates that this competitor is not successful in AI Overviews, but using this method you will likely find clear winners of AI Overviews, for example: 

If you find a competitor that’s doing really well in AI Overviews, you can learn from them. Try to figure out what they’re doing right and apply those insights to your own site to boost your success. I will show you how to do it later in the article. 

2. Use a single project

If you prefer a more streamlined approach, you can use a single project to track your site and then see (in the competition tab) who’s winning. Here’s how:

  1. Set up a project for your site. Start by setting up a project for your own site in ZipTie. Add your list of keywords to this project.
  1. Identify and analyze the winners and losers. To do so, go to the Competition tab:

Here’s the zoomed-in version of the chart: 

In the Competition tab, you can quickly see how well your competitors are doing in AI Overviews compared to organic search. This gives you a quick overview of who’s winning and who’s losing.

For example “Space.com” and “science.nasa.gov” have significantly increased their presence in AI Overviews compared to traditional organic rankings. 

P.S. If you prefer table view, just scroll to see the table version. 

Learning from the data

Once you have the data, it’s time to learn from it and improve your own content. 

Try to understand why competitors are winning: look at the content of the competitors who are doing well in AI Overviews. 

In the previous step we identified a list of winners. Now go to the Queries tab and select: “set filters”. 

Then select filter: “list of sources contains: “space.com” (the domain we identified as an AI Overviews winner). 

Then you can select any keyword and get more information: you will see an AI Overview screenshot, list of AI overview sources.

Now there are two strategies you might want to try:

  1. Understand why Google chose their content. Is it more relevant? Or maybe it’s of a higher quality? Does it answer the query better?
  2. Compare your content to the AI Overview and see what’s missing. You can use tools like ChatGPT to help identify gaps. 

Try this sample prompt:

Take two things into consideration. AI Overview and my content. Then create a table: – first column: Aspect found in AI overview
– second column: is it covered by my content?
– third column: quick comment why it’s beneficial to add this to my content. 
Give a short summary on what’s missing. Here’s AI Overview: “””
{paste AI Overview here}
“””
Here’s my content: “””
{paste your content here}
“””

ChatGPT will give you a couple of ideas on how to improve your content: 

Then you can optimize your content by using the insights you’ve gained.

Once you fix your content, request indexing and see if this strategy works for your website.  This will increase your chances of being featured in AI Overviews.

Keep an eye on things

Remember, AI Overviews can change just like regular search results. It’s essential to keep monitoring to see who’s winning and losing over time. ZipTie makes it easy to set up monitoring so you can stay on top of changes.

In ZipTie, you can set up monitoring to check the queries regularly. This way, you’ll see changes quickly and can adjust your strategy as needed.

If you see a competitor gaining ground, analyze their content and see what you can learn from it.

Putting it all together

By following these steps, you can get a leg up on the competition and make sure your content is ready for AI Overviews when they roll out in your area. Here’s a quick recap:

  1. There are two options to track your competition: 
    1. track competitors separately: 
    2. Use a single project to track your competitors all in one place. 
  2. Learn from the data: understand why competitors are winning, compare your content, and optimize it based on the insights.
  3. Keep monitoring: set up regular monitoring in ZipTie and adjust your strategy based on the data.

Get started with ZipTie, track your competitors, learn from the data, and keep optimizing your content. You’ll be ready to take full advantage of AI Overviews and boost your online presence. You can start a free 14-day trial now! 

Happy tracking!