Competitor Visibility Baseline Reconciliation (Onboarding)

Competitor Visibility Baseline Reconciliation (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Pull the client's last 90 days of organic landing page and query data before opening any competitor tool

   Export from Google Search Console and the client's analytics so the internal baseline exists independently of whatever a third-party index reports.

2. 02

   Select three to five competitors the client names in sales calls, not the ones a tool ranks highest

   Tools surface whoever has the largest indexed footprint. Sales-call competitors reveal who actually blocks deals, which is a different list.

3. 03

   Run the same ten to fifteen commercial-intent queries through each monitoring platform and record which domains appear

   Platforms such as SpyFu and Linkody index traditional SERPs while KIME and Pallix track AI answer surfaces, so the two result sets will not match and both belong in the record.

4. 04

   Log the gap between tool-reported visibility and the client's own analytics for every query in the set

   A 20 to 40 percent divergence is common because third-party crawlers miss logged-in, personalized, and geo-varied results. Document the delta rather than averaging it away.

5. 05

   Flag any competitor whose visibility rests on a single channel before presenting the baseline

   A rival ranking only through backlinks from one directory, or only through AI citations from Reddit threads, is a different strategic target than one with broad coverage.

6. 06

   Write the reconciled baseline into the client's onboarding document with the capture date on every figure

   Visibility numbers decay within weeks. An undated baseline becomes unusable by the second retainer month.

7. 07

   Set the review cadence and name the person who owns re-running the query set

   Assign it to a named delivery lead with a monthly slot on the calendar, otherwise the baseline is captured once and never refreshed.