Core concepts
Projects and competitors
A project is the workspace CompetLab monitors — it holds your own domain, the competitors you track, and the AI prompts CompetLab runs to measure visibility. Everything else on this page is scoped to a project: dimensions are measured per project, scores and alerts belong to a project, and each project gets its own Strategic Briefing.
A competitor is a domain you add to a project. CompetLab folds each one into every dimension — its AI Visibility, homepage positioning, pricing, published content, Tech & Trust profile, and the researched dimensions in the briefing — and for the monitored dimensions it tracks the competitor’s homepage and pricing page over time. Your own domain sits in the same competitor list, flagged as your own, so every metric is computed for you exactly as it is for them. That side-by-side symmetry is what makes the gap between you and a rival meaningful rather than decorative.
A project also records per-dimension freshness, so you can see when AI Visibility, Pricing, or any other dimension last ran. You can run more than one project — for different brands, markets, or competitive sets — and each is monitored independently. The objects nest like this:
Project = your domain + competitors + AI prompts
│
├─ 5 monitored dimensions → live scores · history · alerts
├─ 8 researched dimensions → compiled for the briefing
│
└─ Strategic Briefing → synthesizes all 13, monthlyThe 13 dimensions
CompetLab measures 13 dimensions of the competitive picture. Five are monitored continuously — polled on a schedule, with history and alerts — and eight are researched for the monthly Strategic Briefing. The tables below use the labels you see in the product.
Monitored continuously (5)
These five run on their own schedules and are the live layer of CompetLab — the part that tells you a competitor changed something this week. Reach them through the Monitoring section and the API reference.
| Dimension | What it measures |
|---|---|
| AI Visibility | How often ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini mention and recommend you versus competitors — a Mention Rate, per-engine rankings, and the AI Visibility Score. |
| Positioning | How each competitor frames itself on its homepage: headline, tagline, value proposition, CTAs, target audience, and main differentiator. |
| Pricing Intelligence | Each competitor’s published plans and prices, market pricing statistics, and where your pricing sits in the gap. |
| Content Intelligence | What each competitor publishes — sitemap size, content sorted into categories, and the gaps between their coverage and yours, tracked as pages come and go. |
| Tech & Trust | Each competitor’s security-headers grade (A–F), trust signals, detected technology stack, and whether they block AI crawlers. |
Two of these read shorter in the monitoring nav than in this registry: Pricing Intelligence is the Pricing page, and Content Intelligence is the Content page — same dimension, shorter label.
Researched for the briefing (8)
These eight aren’t polled on a timer. CompetLab researches them when it assembles your monthly briefing, so they cover the slower-moving, higher-context signals that read better as a periodic synthesis than as a live feed.
| Dimension | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Agent Adoption | How ready a competitor’s site is for AI agents — discoverability, access control, content readability, and agent endpoints. |
| AI Ecosystem | A competitor’s footprint in the AI ecosystem — the integrations, partnerships, and model relationships shaping the space. |
| Customer Voice | What customers say about a competitor — reviews, ratings, and sentiment across public channels. |
| Funding & Capital | Funding rounds, investors, and capital events that signal a competitor’s momentum and runway. |
| Hiring & GTM | Hiring signals and go-to-market moves — the roles a competitor is opening and where it’s investing in growth. |
| Landscape | The wider competitive map — who else is in the space, new entrants, and how the field is shifting. |
| Product Launches | New products, features, and releases shipped across the competitive set. |
| Reliability & Status | Uptime, incidents, and status-page history — how reliable a competitor’s service has been. |
Monitored vs researched
The split is about cadence and depth: monitored dimensions are tracked continuously, researched dimensions are compiled periodically for the briefing. Both feed the Strategic Briefing, but only the monitored five carry live history and raise alerts.
The five monitored dimensions run on their own schedules, store every run in a history you can page through, and record an alert whenever a run detects a meaningful change. This is the layer you check between briefings. The eight researched dimensions surface only in the monthly briefing — CompetLab researches them fresh each edition rather than keeping a minute-by-minute feed — which suits slower-moving signals like funding, hiring, the market landscape, and how prepared competitors’ sites are for AI agents.
| Aspect | Monitored (5) | Researched (8) |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Continuous, on a per-dimension schedule | Compiled for each monthly briefing |
| History | Full run history per dimension | As-of, per briefing edition |
| Alerts | Yes — changes raise alerts | No — surfaced in the briefing |
| Where you read it | Per-dimension dashboards + the API | The Strategic Briefing |
The AI Visibility Score
The AI Visibility Score is a single 0–100 composite of how visible you are in AI answers — how often an engine names you, and how highly it ranks you, when someone asks about your space. Higher is better.
It blends two signals CompetLab tracks separately — your Mention Rate and your average rank — into one number, computed the same way for you and every competitor, so the figure that usually matters is the gap: how far you sit behind the brand the engines recommend most.
The AI Visibility dimension covers what a check looks like and everything it surfaces; Methodology explains how the score is collected and computed, and where its limits are.
The Strategic Briefing
The Strategic Briefing is CompetLab’s monthly deliverable: a synthesized, prioritized read across all 13 dimensions that tells you what changed, what it means, and what to do about it. It’s the analyzed layer on top of the raw monitoring — a decision document, not another dashboard.
It’s the one place all 13 dimensions come together: the 5 monitored dimensions bring their live history, and the 8 researched dimensions are compiled specifically for it.
The Briefing section covers what’s inside an edition, how it’s generated from the 13 dimensions, and how to read one; the Strategic Briefing API reference has the response shape.
Where to go next
- Monitoring → — the five monitored dimensions, plus alerts and schedules.
- Briefing → — the Strategic Briefing: how it’s built, read, and refreshed.
- MCP Server → and REST API → — the two ways to pull these concepts into your tools and your code.
- Quickstart → — set up a project and see the concepts in action.
FAQ
What are the 13 dimensions?
The 13 dimensions are the facets of a competitor CompetLab measures. Five are monitored continuously: AI Visibility, Positioning, Pricing Intelligence, Content Intelligence, and Tech & Trust. Eight more are researched for the monthly Strategic Briefing: Agent Adoption, AI Ecosystem, Customer Voice, Funding & Capital, Hiring & GTM, Landscape, Product Launches, and Reliability & Status. The five monitored dimensions run on a schedule and carry history and alerts; the eight researched dimensions are compiled fresh for each briefing. Together they cover how AI engines see you, how rivals position and price, what they publish, how trustworthy and agent-ready their sites are, and the market moving around them.
What is the difference between monitored and researched dimensions?
Monitored dimensions are tracked continuously; researched dimensions are compiled for the briefing. The five monitored dimensions — AI Visibility, Positioning, Pricing Intelligence, Content Intelligence, and Tech & Trust — run on a schedule, keep a full run history you can page through, and raise alerts when something changes. The eight researched dimensions — Agent Adoption, AI Ecosystem, Customer Voice, Funding & Capital, Hiring & GTM, Landscape, Product Launches, and Reliability & Status — aren't polled on a timer; CompetLab researches them fresh when it assembles your monthly Strategic Briefing. So monitored dimensions answer what changed today, with a timeline; researched dimensions give you a periodic, synthesized read rather than a live feed.
What does AI Visibility measure?
AI Visibility measures how often, and how prominently, AI engines name you when someone asks about your space. For each check, CompetLab runs a set of prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and records who gets mentioned and in what order. It reports a Mention Rate (the share of queries where you appear), an average rank when you do appear (lower is better), and an AI Visibility Score — a single 0–100 composite that blends the two into one number. The same figures are computed for every competitor in the project, so you can read the gap between you and the brand the engines recommend most. Higher scores mean you show up more, and higher up.
What is Tech & Trust?
Tech & Trust is the monitored dimension covering a competitor's security posture, trust signals, and technology. For each competitor CompetLab reports a security-headers grade from A to F (checking HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options), a set of trust signals grouped into categories, the detected technology stack — hosting, frameworks, analytics, and more — the site's DNS infrastructure, and whether its robots.txt blocks AI crawlers. It's one of the five dimensions monitored continuously, so each of these carries history and can trigger an alert when it changes. Read it to gauge how hardened and credible a rival's site looks, what they're built on, and where their setup leaves them exposed.
What is the Strategic Briefing?
The Strategic Briefing is CompetLab's monthly deliverable — a synthesized, prioritized read across all 13 dimensions. It doesn't just show raw monitoring data; it says what changed, what it means, and what to do about it. Each briefing opens with an executive hub — a headline, the top moves to make, and a one-line verdict for every dimension — and lets you drill into a deep-dive per dimension, a ranked list of actions, and a competitor read. Because eight of the 13 dimensions are researched only for the briefing, it's the one place all 13 come together. It's generated automatically per project and refreshed roughly every 30 days.
How often is each dimension updated?
The five monitored dimensions update on a recurring schedule, and the eight researched dimensions update with each monthly briefing. AI Visibility, Positioning, Pricing Intelligence, Content Intelligence, and Tech & Trust each run on their own monitoring schedule — you can see the interval and the next and last run times per dimension — and every run is kept in history. The eight researched dimensions — Agent Adoption, AI Ecosystem, Customer Voice, Funding & Capital, Hiring & GTM, Landscape, Product Launches, and Reliability & Status — are refreshed when the Strategic Briefing is regenerated, which happens roughly every 30 days. So the monitored side moves on its own cadence; the researched side moves with the briefing.
What is a project?
A project is the workspace CompetLab monitors — your own domain, the competitors you track, and the AI prompts it runs to measure visibility. Everything else is scoped to a project: dimensions are measured per project, scores and alerts belong to a project, and the Strategic Briefing is generated per project. Your own domain sits alongside the competitors in the same list (flagged as your own) so every comparison is you against them. Each project also stores per-dimension freshness, so you can see when AI Visibility, Pricing, or any other dimension was last updated. You can run more than one project — for different brands, markets, or competitive sets.
Can I track competitors?
Yes — competitors are one of the two objects you set up in a project. You add each competitor as a domain, and CompetLab folds it into every dimension: its AI Visibility, homepage positioning, pricing, published content, and Tech & Trust profile, plus the researched dimensions in the briefing. For the monitored dimensions, CompetLab tracks each competitor's homepage and pricing page and keeps a run history. Your own domain is included in the competitor list so every metric is computed for you the same way it is for them, which is what makes the side-by-side gap meaningful. Add, and compare against, the set that actually competes for your buyers.
What is the Agent Adoption dimension?
Agent Adoption is the researched dimension that gauges how ready a competitor's site is for AI agents. It looks at discoverability, access control, content readability, and whether the site exposes agent endpoints — following an open Agent-Adoption specification — to judge how easily an automated agent can find, read, and act on the site. It's one of the eight dimensions researched for the Strategic Briefing rather than monitored continuously. CompetLab also offers a standalone Agent Adoption Check as a free scan you can run against any domain on demand.
Which dimensions get alerts?
Alerts come from the five monitored dimensions — AI Visibility, Positioning, Pricing Intelligence, Content Intelligence, and Tech & Trust. When a monitoring run detects a meaningful change — a competitor drops a price, rewrites its homepage, ships new content, or changes its security posture — CompetLab records an alert with the change and a hint at what to do. Alerts carry a severity (critical, high, medium, or info) and a dimension, so you can filter to what matters. The eight researched dimensions don't raise standalone alerts; their movement surfaces in the monthly Strategic Briefing instead. In short, the continuously monitored side is the part that pings you between briefings.