Ask a marketer what they track on a competitor and you get the same three answers.
Traffic. Followers. How many ads they run.
All three are easy to find. That is why everyone has them, and why they tell you so little. I wrote about metrics that mean nothing before.
Here are four I look at instead. Every number below comes from the public examples on this site and the data behind them.
1. How long they let an ad run
Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money. So an old ad is usually a winning ad.
We took a sample of 50 live ads per brand in early October and counted how long each had been running. From the Loop vs Hears vs Alpine benchmark:
- Alpine: median 149 days.
- Loop: median 114 days, and 82% of the sample past 90 days.
- Hears: median 87 days, and 38% past 90 days.
Loop and Hears sell the same thing. Most of Loop's live ads are over three months old. Most of Hears' are not.
The number of ads tells you how busy they are. The age tells you what works. More on that in what they refuse to switch off.
2. Whether an AI names them
When someone asks an AI which earplugs to buy, somebody gets named. I wanted to know who.
We asked 18 earplug questions on four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. 70 answers came back.
Loop is named in 48 of them. Hears in 17.
Now split it by engine, because the engines do not agree.
- Perplexity: Loop 83%, Hears 17%.
- Gemini: Loop 72%, Hears 44%.
Same questions, same run. On Perplexity, Hears barely appears. On Gemini, it is in almost half the answers.
Your share of AI answers is not one number. It is four, and they can sit far apart.
No SEO report shows you this. More on share of AI answers and why engines disagree.
3. How fast the first email arrives
We signed up to six food and drink newsletters on 9 October and timed the reply.
- Poppi: 5 seconds.
- Olipop: 2 minutes, with 15% off.
- Graza: 3 minutes, with free shipping.
- Fishwife: 2 minutes, no offer.
- Athletic Brewing: nothing, two days later.
Two of the four that wrote back gave something for the address. Two did not. That is a decision about what a subscriber is worth, and you can see it without asking anyone.
It is all in the Email Index, as of 11 October. It is early: four emails so far.
4. Which countries they sell to
This one hides in the page source, so almost nobody looks.
A store that sells in several countries tells Google which version of the site is for which market. The tag is called hreflang, and it is the brand's own list of the markets it maintains.
From 9 to 27 September, Loop's site declared 22 versions. On 4 October it declared 20. The two that went were both Italian: Italian for Italy and English for Italy.
Today the Italian pages return a 404.
Loop has not said a word about Italy, but its own markup did.
For scale, Alpine declares 23 versions, Italy included. Hears declares none and runs one site for everyone.
More in how one brand went from 8 localised sites to 22.
Why these four
An ad that survives, an AI that names you, a welcome email, a list of countries. All four move before revenue does, and none of them shows up in a traffic tool.
And all four are public. Your competitor publishes them whether they mean to or not.
Pick one competitor and see where they stand. The first benchmark is free: one domain, measured against you, no card and no call. Start here.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.