Best tool for benchmarking against named competitors, compared on how many competitors each tier actually allows

A benchmark is only as honest as the field it is run against, so the row to read first in any plan table is the competitor cap. Read on 31 October 2026, the published caps are far apart. AthenaHQ publishes unlimited competitors on its 295 dollar Starter plan. Scrunch Core allows five. Conductor publishes five, twenty five and seventy five or more across its three plans. Evertune and Goodie tick competitor benchmarking on every tier without publishing a number. Ahrefs does not need a cap for research, because its index covers any brand you type.

That spread matters because a five competitor cap in a category with nine real suppliers produces a share of a field you chose. The number will look clean, it will be repeatable, and it will answer a slightly different question from the one you asked.

The published caps

Vendor and plan	Competitors allowed	What else the plan publishes about the field
AthenaHQ Starter, 295 dollars a month	unlimited	unlimited topics and prompts, 11 engines, impersonation tracking
Conductor Enterprise	75 or more	60,000 or more tracked keywords, 10 or more websites
Conductor Growth	25	2,500 AI search credits a year, 5,000 keywords
Conductor Essentials	5	no AI search credit row at all
Scrunch Core, 250 dollars a month	5	125 prompts, 5,000 responses, 1 country, 1 persona
Scrunch Enterprise	custom	9 engines, product observability
Evertune, all three plans	benchmarking ticked, no count published	11 models on Pro, 100 samples a prompt from Pro
Goodie, all three plans	benchmarking ticked, no count published	110 to 500 or more prompts, daily collection
Ahrefs Brand Radar	any brand in the index	519 million or more prompts, 150 to 600 plan checks
AI Knows Us, ours	no cap published	who gets named instead of you and which page won them the slot, from Growth

Our own row is a gap on this criterion and it is worth stating rather than glossing. We publish no competitor cap at all, which means a buyer cannot check this line against us the way they can against Scrunch or Conductor. What our plan table publishes instead is the output: the rivals that appeared in the answers and the page that won them the slot, derived from the readings rather than configured in advance.

Two ways to pick the field, and only one of them is a benchmark

A configured field is the list you type into the tool. It is stable, it is comparable month to month, and it is only as good as your own view of the market. It is the right design when you know exactly who you lose deals to.

A derived field is whoever actually appeared in the answers. It is less tidy, it changes, and it is the only one that can surprise you. In our own September and October readings the names that turned up beside a question were frequently not the names a vendor would have listed, and one rival was named twice while being cited 65 times, which is a pattern a configured list would never have exposed.

The practical answer is to run both. Configure the five or ten you already fear, then read the answer text for names you did not configure and add them. A tool that caps you at five makes the second half impossible, which is the real cost of that row.

What to test in a trial, in one afternoon

1. Add a competitor you know wins deals against you and see whether it appears at all. If the tool reports it at zero while you can produce an answer naming it, the question set is the problem rather than the rival.
2. Read one full answer where a rival was recommended and you were not. That single screen is worth more than a quarter of trend lines, and it is also where you discover whether the product stores answer text or only labels.
3. Count the names in the answers that are not on your list. That number tells you whether your configured field is the market or your assumption about it.
4. Ask how often the benchmark refreshes. Goodie and Evertune publish daily collection, Ahrefs publishes daily on AI prompts, and we read priority questions weekly and the rest at 30 and 90 days.

Where rivals beat us, said plainly

AthenaHQ publishes an unlimited competitor set at a published monthly price and we publish no figure on this line at all. Conductor publishes a ladder of 5, 25 and 75 or more, so an enterprise buyer can size the field before a call. Evertune benchmarks across 11 models against our five apps, and from its Pro plan it does so with a published sample count of 100 per prompt, which is the thing that makes a competitive gap statistically real rather than anecdotal. Goodie and Evertune both collect daily where we do not.

Where we add something is in what gets done with the finding. Our plans pair the derived competitor list with the pages written to answer the questions where somebody else is being named, and we publish which page won the rival the slot. Knowing the name is the easy half; knowing which page the engine read to pick them is the half that tells a writer what to do on Monday, and why an AI answer may recommend a competitor is the diagnostic for it.

Questions about benchmarking against named competitors

How many competitors should I track?

Every supplier a buyer would shortlist beside you, which in most categories is between six and twelve. That number is above the entry plan cap of two of the vendors above, which is why the cap row decides the purchase.

Which tool allows the most competitors?

On published rows, AthenaHQ with unlimited on its Starter plan at 295 dollars a month, then Conductor at 75 or more on Enterprise. Ahrefs sidesteps the question because its index lets you research any brand.

Can I benchmark without naming competitors in advance?

Yes, and you should, because the engine will name companies you did not think of. That requires a product that stores the full answer text so you can read the names out of it.

Is a competitor gap the same as a traffic gap?

No. A rival being named more often than you in assistant answers is a share of recommendation finding. What arrives on your site from an assistant is a traffic finding with a different instrument behind it, and the two numbers should never be averaged.

What do I do with the benchmark once I have it?

Take the questions where a rival is named and you are not, read the sources the engine used, and decide whether the gap is a missing page of yours or a third party page that favours them. Those two findings have different fixes and the same benchmark produces both.

Read the cap before the dashboard

Every product in this market will draw you a competitor bar chart, and the chart is downstream of one configuration field whose limit is published in the plan table. Five is a small field for a real market. Unlimited at a published price is unusual and worth paying attention to. And the derived list, the names that show up unprompted in the answers, is the one most buyers have never seen, because the tool they bought asked them to type the field in first.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.