Your Competitor Comparison Audit: 12 Showdown Prompts

You can get a first read on your Showdown, the ANSWER category that measures how you fare when AI compares you head-to-head against a competitor, in under half an hour. You need your real rivals, 12 comparison prompts, a logged-out browser, and a place to take notes. This audit shows you how to run it and how to read what you get. For the full background, see the Showdown pillar guide.

Before You Start: 3 Rules

1. Log out. Run every query in a logged-out or private session, so the engine is not drawing on your history.
2. One fresh chat per prompt. Start a new conversation each time, so one comparison does not color the next.
3. Pick your real matchups. Use the 2 or 3 competitors customers actually weigh you against, not the ones you wish they did.

The 12 Prompts

Replace [brand] with your name, [competitor] with a real rival, and the bracketed scenarios with your own. Run these for each key competitor.

1. "[brand] vs [competitor], which is better?"
2. "[brand] or [competitor] for [customer type]?"
3. "How does [brand] compare to [competitor] for [use case]?"
4. "Is [brand] or [competitor] better value for money?"
5. "[brand] vs [competitor] for a growing [customer type]?"
6. "Which is more reliable, [brand] or [competitor]?"
7. "What are the main differences between [brand] and [competitor]?"
8. "Should I choose [brand] or [competitor] for [specific need]?"
9. "[competitor] alternatives, is [brand] one of them?"
10. "Why would I pick [brand] over [competitor]?"
11. "Why would I pick [competitor] over [brand]?"
12. "Between [brand], [competitor], and [second competitor], which should I choose for [use case]?"

Run each on at least 2 engines, for example ChatGPT and Perplexity, plus Google's AI answers if you can.

How to Read the Results

For each answer, record 4 things: who the engine recommended, what it credited you with, what it credited the competitor with, and whether anything it said about you was wrong or out of date.

Then look at the pattern. If you win or hold your own across most prompts with accurate strengths cited, your Showdown is strong. If you lose consistently to one specific rival, you have a targeted matchup to work on. If the engine credits you for the wrong things or repeats a stale fact, you have an accuracy problem that caps your score even when you nominally win. And if the engine dismisses you in a clause before really comparing, you are being dropped before the comparison is fair, which is explained in Dropped before the Comparison Was Fair.

What This Check Cannot Tell You

A 12-prompt pass is a useful hint, not a baseline. It covers a few matchups, on one occasion, scored by eye, and AI answers vary from one ask to the next. A real measurement runs many comparisons, repeats them, covers more engines, and scores every answer the same way so the result is stable and trackable over time. Doing that across every competitor by hand is a real undertaking, which is the honest reason most teams have it run for them.

If your audit turns up losses or wrong claims, the next step is a proper baseline and a fix plan. A HiBot audit measures your Showdown across your real matchups and ranks what to fix first. The tactics are in How to Improve Your Showdown Score. Download the ANSWER whitepaper to see the method, or request an AI visibility audit at hibot.com.