How Are Your Competitors Beating You?

On 11 October we asked ChatGPT 18 questions an earplug buyer might ask. Fifteen of them don't mention Hears.

Best earplugs for sleep. For concerts. For kids. For ADHD.

Hears came up in none of the fifteen.

Not even this one: "best alternative to Loop earplugs". ChatGPT answered with Eargasm and Alpine.

Loop showed up in 13 of the 18 answers. Alpine in 7. Hears only appeared when the question had its name in it.

If you are Hears, that is the moment you get the feeling. Someone is winning. You just don't know where.

So I sat in Hears' chair and went through our Loop vs Hears and Hears vs Alpine benchmarks, looking for the places they pull ahead. Call it a competitor analysis example, with real numbers.

1. The words people search for

Alpine is the smaller site. Similarweb estimates it at about 131,000 visits a month, against 457,000 for Hears.

But look at what each one gets found for. In Ahrefs' model, Alpine's top search words are "ear muffs", "hearing protection" and "motorcycle ear plugs". Hears' are "hears", "hears earplugs" and "hears earplugs reviews".

So 97.5% of the search traffic Ahrefs can see for Hears comes from people who already know the name. For Alpine it is 0%.

Loop is branded too. The difference is that people actually type its name. Over 12 weeks, Loop got 92% of US Google searches for the five earplug brand names we track. Hears got 2.3%.

And of the search traffic Hears does get, an estimated 59.6% is paid for. Loop: 46.3%. Alpine: 32.5%.

Hears pays for the buyers who already know it, and the buyers who don't rarely find it on their own.

2. The pages on the site

Loop has 249 blog posts in its sitemap. Hears has 23.

Loop has 59 pages built for one situation: earplugs for ADHD, for kids, for sleeping, for concerts. Hears has 19.

Line that up against the ChatGPT questions. ADHD, kids, sleep, concerts. Loop has a page for each, and ChatGPT named Loop in each answer.

I can't prove the pages caused the answers. Hears has a page for motorcyclists, and ChatGPT still named Alpine for motorcycle riding, not Hears. In Ahrefs' model, Alpine is the one ranking for "motorcycle ear plugs".

But an AI can't quote a page you never wrote. (More on that in the ranking nobody is checking.)

Where Hears wins

Here is the part I like. Hears has the better rating on its own product pages: 4.82, against Loop's 4.29.

So the people who find Hears like it. The product isn't where Hears is losing. It loses in the places a stranger starts: an AI answer, a search for the problem, a page about their exact situation.

Do this for your own competitor

Your analytics can't show you any of this. They only see the people who already found you.

The gaps sit on the other side: in your competitor's sitemap, their ad library, the answers an AI gives about your category. All public. Just tedious to collect.

That is what we do. Pick one competitor and we will measure them against you, the same way as here. The first benchmark is free, no card and no call. Start here.